In brief: With Nvidia's recent RTX series continuing to make headlines, we're still waiting to see how AMD will respond to its rival's ray tracing tech. Now, Radeon Technologies Group's Senior Vice President of Engineering, David Wang, has given his own view on the matter, which could suggest what AMD has in store.
At AMD's Next Horizon event, where the company announced its 7nm Vega 20 architecture, Japanese gaming website 4Gamer interviewed Wang about the firm's future plans, including where it stands on ray tracing.
Due to the unreliable nature of machine translations of foreign websites, it seems some interpretations of what Wang said haven't been entirely accurate. Many assumed he said AMD wouldn't implement ray tracing until it could be applied to both low-end and high-end products, but those weren't his precise words.
OC3D contacted a native Japanese speaker to get the full story. It appears that Wang confirmed "AMD will definitely respond to [Microsoft's] DirectX Ray Tracing (DXR)," but he initially said, "This is a personal view."
Importantly, Wang also said he believed raytraced games wouldn't become widespread until the technology was available on all tiers of GPUs, not just the most expensive, high-end options. It appears this is the statement that has caused confusion---Wang isn't saying AMD is waiting to introduce ray tracing until it can be applied to all its GPUs.
We're going to have to wait to find out exactly when AMD plans to introduce ray tracing technology to its gaming graphics card lineup, but don't expect it any time soon.