Radeon RX 5000 owners are asking AMD for software ray tracing

Owners of Radeon RX 5000 cards are asking AMD to add software ray tracing for the first generation of RDNA. The prompt is Gears of War: E-Day: the shooter requires hardware ray-tracing blocks and will not start on cards without them, including the RX 5700 XT.

Those cards can still run games in ordinary rasterization, but AMD’s ray accelerators arrived with RDNA 2, the RX 6000 series. E-Day’s minimum spec lists a GeForce RTX 2060 or a Radeon RX 6600, and it states that the GPU needs hardware ray tracing.

Players want a software mode, even with a heavy speed loss. They point to the open RADV driver on Linux, where some ray-tracing work on older Radeon cards is done in software. Similar requirements are showing up beyond E-Day, and RX 5700 XT owners were worried about this outcome before release.