Ray tracing has long been "proven" only to be playable on GPUs boasting hardware-accelerated ray-tracing capabilities. However, AMD GPUs dating back to the first GCN-based graphics cards (including GPUs such as the Radeon HD 7970) have been capable of running ray tracing for a while through software emulation. Clewless Clay on YouTube brought this fact to our attention, and several sources demonstrate ray-tracing on older AMD GPUs, including a Vega 64 graphics card running Indiana Jones and the Great Circle at well over 30 FPS.
The software-based ray-tracing implementation offers surprisingly potent performance. One YouTuber fittingly named "no RTX no problem" shared a video of an RX Vega 64 running Indiana Jones and the Great Circle in Linux Fedora 41 at 1080p with 50% resolution scaling (720p internal resolution) with medium graphics settings at playable frame rates. Frame rates hovered anywhere between 50 to 60 FPS average.
