Battlefield 5’s ray tracing build isn’t necessarily limited to Nvidia’s RTX cards

While the current ray tracing alpha build of Battlefield 5 we’ve been playing with is currently dependent on Nvidia’s RTX graphics cards, that doesn’t have to be the case going forward. Because DICE has built the gorgeous-looking ray traced reflections using Microsoft’s DirectX Ray tracing API, it can be made compatible with any GPU that has support for Microsoft’s upcoming tech. The whole point of DXR is that it can be used as an almost plug and play module in, or alongside, the traditional DirectX API. That means any hardware that is made to be compatible with the new API will also be compatible with any titles that use DXR to enable the advanced visual effects in-game. Whether that be a new AMD architecture or even a future Intel discrete gaming GPU. At the moment, however, it’s all rather moot as neither of Nvidia’s GPU competition has made any noises about even getting close to putting ray tracing at the fore of their design efforts for upcoming architectures. The next-gen AMD Navi GPU is only set to be a mainstream replacement for the Polaris technology - so it’s unlikely to have anywhere near the necessary dedicated grunt for ray tracing that Nvidia's mighty new RTX 2080 can boast - and who knows what Intel is planning.