The next Xbox generation will have raytracing cores for more realistic shading and shading. That’s what Colin Penty, The Coalation Technical Art Director ( Gears 5), told Gamespot. “I’m definitely excited about what the new hardware is capable of, and having dedicated raytracing hardware is great,” said the lead developer.

At the announcement of the upcoming Xbox, Microsoft had only talked generally about raytracing support and did not narrow down how it would be calculated. In the desktop segment Nvidia already sells graphics cards with dedicated Raytracing cores with the Geforce RTX (Turing) since summer 2018, but there is also a software fallback for the Geforce GTX 16×0 (Turing Light) and the Geforce GTX 10×0 (Pascal). AMD has not yet enabled raytracing in the driver.

The Xbox Anaconda, the internal code name for the faster Project Scarlett console, and the next Playstation are each based on a custom AMD chip. It combines eight Zen 2 cores with a graphics unit based on an advanced RDNA technique, such as those used in Navi cards such as the Radeon RX 5700 (XT). RDNA v1 does not yet have Raytracing cores, but AMD does provide for RDNA v2.

According to Microsoft, the next Xbox will be released by the end of 2020, well into late autumn, just in time for Christmas. From Sony, there is no official statement on the release date of the upcoming Playstation, but it should also be so far in 2020 – neither of the two manufacturers will leave the other here a significant time advantage.