Ray Tracing Coming to AMD's RX 5000 series ?

Nvidia was the first to support DXR and made real time ray tracing possible in gaming but AMD never announced any such feature when they launched their RX 5000 series cards to compete with Nvidia's RTX series. But they never seemed to neglect it.

Graphics in gaming have evolved in quite a great extent - from 80's old school title like Mario to modern-day triple-A title like Battlefield V, we came so far and now the technology has started to saturate. Now among the few things left to improve; Ray tracing is a part of it. Ray tracing was there in CGI and animation before but it never came to gaming until Nvidia launched RTX series. It was because real-time ray tracing needs too much processing power.

Nvidia's RTX on vs RTX off.

AMD announced its RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT in E3 2019. They focused on the esports titles as they need more fps. They ignored DXR because the technology is new and it drastically reduced performance when turned on. Instead, they introduced RIS or Radeon image sharpening.
According to AMD, it is an intelligent contrast-adaptive sharpening algorithm that produces visuals that look crisp and detailed, with virtually no performance impact.

With the announcement of Xbox's Project Scarlet and Play station 5, it is confirmed that AMD has the hardware to support ray tracing. ( Both the consoles will be using AMD's Zen 2 based CPU and Navi GPU. More posts on these consoles are coming soon.)

Recently a guy named Komachi tweeted "we can see AMD enabling DXR in its RX series cards in the coming days." Someone commented that DXR will not be enabled anytime soon. Komachi replied with a proof saying the already implemented it in the driver update but has not been enabled yet.

Ray tracing surely makes the graphics look great but it comes with a cost. Currently, the devices that support it are overpriced and the performance is not that good according to the cost. The RTX 2080 in India costs around 60k-80k INR. At that price, pc gamers expect top-notch performance which they fail to achieve even with dedicated RT cores.

That is the reason AMD is not focusing on Ray tracing for pc. Their aim is to give the gamers what they deserve. The graphics will still look great without Ray tracing and there will be no drastic fps drop. But analysing the leaks, I think AMD might enable ray for their existing RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT or announce some other high end cards based on RDNA in coming days. Fingers crossed !!!