How to use Ray tracing on compatible AMD graphics cards

Although AMD only officially supports Ray Tracing on the RX 6000, there is the possibility to use this technology on any Radeon GPU through a MOD called ReShade Ray Tracing Shader. Of course, it will not be that simple.

Many users have been left without the possibility of enjoying Ray Tracing due to having an old GPU, be it AMD or NVIDIA. Although NVIDIA has offered this technology since 2018, AMD has started to support it in 2020, so there are many users of Radeon graphics cards who will not be able to use it. However, there is the possibility of doing it through this shader.

Benchmarks to test RTX on your GPU

First of all, it must be said that Ray Tracing tests are possible with a GPU that is not compatible with this technology. We come to refer to any NVIDIA GTX 1000 GPU, as well as any AMD graphics card with RDNA architecture or the RX 500 series.

As examples, we find these benchmarks:

Crytek's Noir Benchmark

McFly's Path Traced Global Illumination

The first is a benchmark that comes with Ray Tracing and is publicly available. Mention that Crytek’s implements Ray Tracing in a very light way, so we can run this test and get decent performance in 1080p. This does not mean that within a game we work at the same rate.

Ending with PTGI, it is another test that can be downloaded, but it is required to pay a monthly subscription of $ 5 to enjoy it. This is because it does not yet have a final version, which will be free for all users. So, those 5 dollars come to be a symbolic gesture in the form of a donation.

Unlike NVIDIA's RTX, the PTGI shader does not treat objects that are not visible on the screen. This would not technically be considered Real Time Ray Tracing, but the result is still better than SSAO or HBAO ambient occlusion. This shader that McFly's uses is called Screen Space Ray-Tracing.

ReShade Ray Tracing

First of all, say that this "trick" does use Real Ray Tracing in real-time, but it does not use the NVIDIA RTX shader, for example. The standard ray tracing that we see in games is one in which each ray of light undergoes an intersection, and, after this, returns to the light source (sun, light bulb, etc.).

Continuing with McFly, it makes use of a path trace, what does this mean? Well, each ray undergoes several intersections with the objects in the scene after being launched and before returning to the source. In practice, this gives more precision in relation to lighting, but why don't NVIDIA and AMD use Ray Tracing in most games?

The main reason is performance, although we do see implementations in Quake or Minecraft where there is route tracking. We emphasize that the NVIDIA Ray Tracing takes into account objects that do not appear on the screen, while the ReShade does not.

How to use ReShade Ray Tracing shader on your GPU

In order not to get lost during the installation process, we are going to explain it step by step and carefully.

• We download ReShade from the official website.
• Once installed, we only have to select the executable of the video game that we are going to play. We will have to select the API, which will normally be DirectX 11. There is a useful trick that is to enable the Afterburner OSD to see which API the game uses.
• Afterwards, ReShade will ask us to select a shader for the game. We can choose the equipment we want.
• We downloaded the ReShade Ray Tracing, which is paid monthly as a subscription and costs $ 4.5. To pay it we have to register on Patreon and pay for this subscription on a monthly basis.

When we have downloaded this shader, we extract the folders "shader" and "textures" in the root of the game where we install ReShade. It will ask us to overwrite, so we click "yes". They update the tool periodically to correct bugs that are reported by the community via Discord.

Worth? Well, take into account the following details:

• NVIDIA and AMD add RT Cores and Ray Accelerators on their RTX 2000, 3000 and RX 6000 to achieve a decent FPS rate with Ray Tracing. In the case of NVIDIA, they are hardware components dedicated to Ray Tracing, although AMD implements RA within the CUs.
• The RX 5000, RX 500 or GTX 1000 GPUs do not support DLSS or Super Resolution. Although AMD hasn't released FidelityFX Super Resolution yet, it has to be said that NVIDIA's DLSS is key to getting decent Ray Tracing performance.
• The Ray Tracing technology is a real-time rendering that consumes many resources. For those GPUs that are low on VRAM memory (less than 8GB GDDR6), I wouldn't recommend trying.

We hope this information has been of interest to you. If you have any questions, you can comment below and we will answer you shortly. Have you tried this option?