AMD announced at CES 2019 the Radeon VII, a poweful 7nm GPU for gamers. Although the card does not support real-time rey tracing like NVIDIA's RTX desktop GPU, AMD CES Lisa Su says that AMD is working on it.

"Our vision on gaming is very broad. We think about it across PCs, consoles, cloud and how we deliver content into all those pieces," said AMD CEO Lisa Su at the sidelines of AMD's presentation at CES. "I think ray tracing is an important technology, it's something we're working on as well from both a hardware and software standpoint. I think the important thing though -- and that's why we talk so much about the development community -- is that technology for technology's sake is okay, but technology done together with partners and really getting the development community fully engaged is really important."

Su says we'll be seeing more gaming talk from AMD this year. Obviously, Su has in her mind the next generation of video game consoles coming from Microsoft and Sony. Those systems, which are expected to launch in 2020, will likely rely on AMD's custom graphics silicon.

"We view it as a broad ecosystem, we don't focus on just one technology, we need all this stuff to really come together," Su said.

NVIDIA has been talking about real-time ray tracing for the past year and has already announced notebook RTX chips, but still the number of games that support the new technology is very limited. Adding support for ray tracing resulted to a premium price for NVIDIA's first bunch of graphics cards (RTX 2070 and 2080), although the recently announced RTX 2060 is more "affordable" .

"What we try and do at AMD is being focused on delivering that value in an ecosystem that can be readily accepted.... Ray tracing is something that we believe the whole industry has to move to, there's no question. But it has to go through that whole development cycle," said AMD CTO Mark Papermaster.

Commenting on AMD's latest GPU, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that AMD’s announcement was “underwhelming” and claimed the NVIDIA RTX 2080 would “crush” AMD’s Radeon VII in benchmarks. “The performance is lousy,” said Huang, referring to AMD’s latest GPU. The comments were made in a roundtable attended media outlets during CES.