lifeblood
Senior member
- Oct 17, 2001
- 999
- 88
- 91
Blindsided is perhaps too strong a word for it. We’ve all known for some time that Real Time Ray Tracing (RTRT) was going to be coming at some point, we just didn’t know when. At some point Nvidia said “we will include RTRT with this release. Engineers, make it so.” When did AMD know about it? Obviously Nvidia didn’t call them on the phone and tell them. AMD would have learned through papers published by Nvidia engineers discussing RTRT, from rumors, etc. How long after Nvidia got serious did AMD get serious? 3 month? 6 months? A year? 3 months is meaningless but a year late is a problem, especially when you’re barely keeping your head above water financially. Obviously AMD knew at least 2 years ago or they wouldn’t have test hardware out right now, but that doesn’t mean it’s a mature design.
Of course, it may be AMD made the first move and said “we will include RTRT with this release. Engineers, make it so” before Nvidia did. Nvidia may have then had to play catch up. But given how much deeper Nvidias pockets are, they were able to catch up and pass AMD.
I doubt we will ever know the full story. Obviously something went wrong with AMD. When was the first RTX card released? September 2018? That was 15 months ago. Where is AMD’s equivalent? To be honest it’s probably more merciful to say AMD was blindsided. That can be forgiven. Anything else starts to smell like incompetence.
Having said that I must also say that maybe AMD was contractually prevented from releasing RTRT earlier so as not to steal the consoles thunder. Again, we don’t know.
Of course, it may be AMD made the first move and said “we will include RTRT with this release. Engineers, make it so” before Nvidia did. Nvidia may have then had to play catch up. But given how much deeper Nvidias pockets are, they were able to catch up and pass AMD.
I doubt we will ever know the full story. Obviously something went wrong with AMD. When was the first RTX card released? September 2018? That was 15 months ago. Where is AMD’s equivalent? To be honest it’s probably more merciful to say AMD was blindsided. That can be forgiven. Anything else starts to smell like incompetence.
Having said that I must also say that maybe AMD was contractually prevented from releasing RTRT earlier so as not to steal the consoles thunder. Again, we don’t know.
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