XB1 has HW accelerated Raytracing abilities and so does the 1X. They don't need Nvidia cards.

Microsoft hates nVidia because of how hard they were burned with the original Xbox.

This won't be available for next gen, or even a potential next gen mid-gen upgrade. Ray Tracing takes a tremendous amount of power, and it's extremely wasteful to do in real time. The GPU's that will be used for next gen won't have the required hardware to support whatever they come up with.

If X1X2 is developed with NVidia, don't expect it to be cheap, and given the nature of console programming, there is no advantage to go with one or the other.

There really is no reason to worry about the GPU when it comes to compatibility. Both use the same subset of low level commands to work, and any old commands are readily emulated without any impact on performance. The reason they sometimes seem wonky on PC is because of driver support, and not actually being low level. It would take a major change to GPU architecture for anything from the past to become incompatible...and the way GPU's are going now, they'll likely be able to simply muscle through any required emulation tasks.

@ Rain

We're not talking about replacing rasterization entirely, but complimenting it with things like true global illumination. MS designed the XB1 to be able to handle this. They even said the 1X wouldn't be held back by the XB1, and now DXR is going to allow the ESRAM and move engines do what they were designed to do. At least now we know why we haven't seen any of the games use the HW for raytracing yet. No API to support it properly.

But yeah, you go on and believe that... even though Unreal, Frostbite, and Unity are already incorporating DXR into their engines, and that Remedy and SEED are showing demos now... we won't see raytracing in any form for the next decade.