News

No AMD users, you cannot enable the real-time ray tracing RTX effects on the Vega 64 (or other AMD GPUs)

103 Comments

A couple of hours ago, a rumour arose suggesting that AMD users can enable the real-time ray tracing RTX effects on their GPUs. Guru3D’s member ‘OnnA’ suggested that by enabling three settings, it may be possible to enable the RTX effects that NVIDIA RTX owners can currently experience. And since we’re in the middle of benchmarking Battlefield 5, we’ve decided to test these settings and see whether it’s possible to have any ray tracing reflections on the AMD Radeon RX Vega 64.

Now as I’m pretty sure you already guessed, this isn’t possible. While it may be possible to enable on paper these settings, AMD’s hardware lacks the hardware to support DXR. After all, there is a reason why AMD publicly stated that it will not support DXR in the near future.

In order to “enable” the RTX settings, we’ve made the changes that OnnA suggested and set our file as “Read Only” (in order to avoid any possible re-writes from the game). We also ran the game in offline mode in order to avoid any replacement of that specific file from the cloud.

As you can see in the following screenshots, though, the game still uses screen-space reflections. We’ve circled the areas of interest in the three screenshots that show the lack of reflections from objects (due to the way screen-space reflections work). Do note that these issues are not present when RTX is enabled so no AMD fans, you cannot enable these effects on your graphics cards in Battlefield 5!