Skip to main content

AMD fixes another hiccup with ray tracing support

Update: AMD has released an urgent hotfix to fix the driver problem that was causing the issue with ray tracing support, which you can download and use here.

The rest of the original story that was posted on July 26, 2023 is below.

Rivet from Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

If you were hoping to play Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart on PC and you have an AMD graphics card, you might feel a little disappointed. It appears that ray tracing will be disabled upon launch, but only on AMD GPUs.

Recommended Videos

Why is ray tracing disabled for AMD cards, and when will it become available? Everything is a little vague right now, but here’s what we know.

The information comes straight from the source. Insomniac Games, the studio behind Ratchet & Clank, talks about various system requirements in this article, and while AMD cards are very much supported, ray tracing is not.

“Ray-tracing on AMD GPUs is disabled at launch. We are working closely with AMD to enable support as soon as possible,” says Insomniac Games.

Admittedly, that doesn’t really say much, although it does leave gamers hopeful that ray tracing might soon be an option for AMD, too. However, AMD itself sheds more light on the matter in a stealthy way — by talking about it in the release notes for its latest Adrenalin driver.

According to AMD, one of the latest known issues is that “application crash or driver timeout” can occur if you try to play Ratchet & Clank with ray tracing and Dynamic Resolution Scaling enabled. It’s unclear which graphics cards are affected, but AMD mentions its flagship Radeon RX 7900 XTX as one of them. AMD said that it’s working on resolving this problem, but it hasn’t provided any specifics as to when we might see the fix.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that you can’t play Ratchet & Clank on your AMD GPU — it just means that ray tracing won’t be an option. For some AMD users, this won’t matter at all, as some of its older GPUs really can’t handle ray tracing all that well, to begin with. Moreover, this will likely be resolved down the line.

For now, if you want to enjoy the full Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart experience at launch, you’re going to need an Nvidia graphics card. Nvidia has teased that the game will be available with DLSS 3, ray tracing, Reflex, and RTX IO on release day. AMD users will have to wait a little longer to see the game in its full glory.

This might not sound like a huge deal, but AMD’s troubled history with ray tracing has been noteworthy over the years in its attempts to keep up with Nvidia. Hopefully, AMD can get this figured out quickly because it’s a little strange that it’s only affecting AMD’s cards.

Monica J. White
Monica is a computing writer at Digital Trends, focusing on PC hardware. Since joining the team in 2021, Monica has written…
AMD may have underestimated the RX 9070
Gigabyte's RX 9070 XT GPU.

AMD's upcoming RX 9000 series is still largely a mystery, but the cards are already out there -- and AMD was actually demoing the RX 9070 during CES 2025. We may not know any specs of the card at this point, but thanks to an early benchmark, we know that it does a surprisingly good job in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. Can it really compete against some of Nvidia's best graphics cards?

The RX 9070 was available for brief testing at the AMD booth, paired with the mighty impressive Ryzen 9 9950X3D. IGN spotted it and gave it a test run in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, which has a built-in benchmarking tool. Mind you, this is the non-XT model, meaning that it's not the flagship card -- but it's unclear just how much worse it'll be than the XT variant.

Read more
Performance leaks for AMD’s RX 9070 XT are all over the place
RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT on a pink background.

We're in that exciting period leading up to the release of some of next year's best graphics cards, and that means leaks and predictions are coming out every single day. The last few weeks have really brought into focus AMD's next-gen flagship, which is now said to be called the RX 9070 XT. But now, more than ever, we're seeing a lot of conflicting information about the kind of performance we can expect from the top RDNA 4 card. The latest leaks see it falling within a stone's throw of Nvidia's RTX 4080.

According to zhangzhonghao on the Chiphell forums (who is a frequent leaker in the CPU and GPU space), the difference between the RX 9070 XT and the RTX 4080 is just 5%. They didn't specify which card was the winner, though, and we don't know which games they were tested in.

Read more
AMD CEO teases RDNA 4 release as gaming revenue drops by 69%
AMD CEO Lisa Su delivering AMD's CES 2023 keynote.

There's been a lot of speculation about the potential release date for AMD's upcoming RDNA 4 graphics cards. Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD, has just put an end to most of these claims. While initial predictions pinned AMD's future best graphics cards at the end of 2024, AMD now confirms that RDNA 4 is on track to launch in early 2025. This announcement arrives alongside a steep decrease in AMD's gaming revenue.

AMD has been quiet about RDNA 4 (or RX 8000 series) for months, but we've seen many reports from various leakers who had something to say about the potential release date for these next-gen GPUs. At the beginning of 2024, these claims were fairly optimistic, with some leakers claiming that the AMD Radeon RX 8000 series might launch as early as this summer. That  did not happen, and as the months went by, many of them adopted a more conservative release window sometime in 2025. Now, thanks to AMD's third-quarter earnings call, we know that those later claims were correct.

Read more