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Our 2026 ray-traced tests span relatively lightweight RT titles such as Doom: The Dark Ages, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced to moderately challenging titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 to performance monsters like Alan Wake II, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and Black Myth: Wukong at its Very High RT preset. If a card passes all of these tests with flying colors, it’s ready for any RT experience you can throw at it.
Beyond the high initial performance cost of enabling ray tracing, RT titles at higher resolutions are more likely to run over lesser cards’ VRAM pools, resulting in rough performance. That behavior tends to show up as wide spreads between average and 1% low frame rates, so keep an eye out in our graphs for when cards with less VRAM start to stumble.
The TL;DR: The RX 9070 GRE handles our RT suite at 1080p just fine, turning in a 65 FPS average and well-controlled 1% lows overall and a nice generational uplift compared to the 7800 XT. That’s a good baseline for enabling FSR 4 upscaling and ML Frame Generation where it’s available in pursuit of higher output resolution targets.
At 1440p, though, the GRE is already showing weakness due to its 12GB of VRAM, barely outperforming the RX 9060 XT 16GB and RX 7800 XT and landing behind even the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB. The RX 9070 and its 16GB of VRAM pull far ahead. If you're serious about RT on a Radeon, we'd strongly suggest stepping up.
DOOM: The Dark Ages
Why it's here: one of a new crop of games that requires RT to run
What it stresses: Compute, RT, VRAM
Even with mandatory RT support and everything cranked to Ultra Nightmare, DOOM: The Dark Ages isn't terribly hard for our stable of graphics cards to run well. The 9070 GRE hands in strong results at 1080p and 1440p, but 4K proves too much (as it does for most of our cards without upscaling).
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
Why it's here: another of a new crop of games that requires RT to run
What it stresses: Compute, RT, VRAM
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a weird beast. It uses a unique fork of the id Tech engine to deliver its cinematic adventure gameplay. And at least in our test area, it's full of autosave points that can have rough effects on 1% lows. We've tried to control for this as much as possible, but just be aware that the 1% lows here are as much a product of the game's behavior as they are any differences between graphics cards.
Alan Wake II
Alan Wake II's RT effects are crushing even without Path Traced Indirect Lighting enabled. The biggest issue beyond the performance demands of these settings is that these effects don't really make a huge visual difference in this title, so you could just as soon ignore them and enjoy much higher frame rates.
Cyberpunk 2077
Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the few RT-heavy titles we've seen where enabling the feature creates major differences in image quality, so you might actually care about its performance. What we’re really looking for here is a solid foundation for upscaling, and the 9070 GRE delivers that level of performance at 1080p with a near-60-FPS average.
At 1080p, 12GB of VRAM is enough to avoid performance cliffs, and you can see the huge generational advantage the 9070 GRE has over the 7800 XT. That raw performance difference persists at 1440p, but the 9070 GRE's 1% lows suggest that 12GB of VRAM is starting to become a problem. And at 4K, the GRE's performance is roughly half that of the RX 9070 and behind even the 7800 XT, showing the advantages of 16GB of VRAM.
But none of those cards are delivering a playable experience at native 4K with RT, showing why it's more important to evaluate 1080p and 1440p as upscaling foundations.
Black Myth Wukong
Black Myth Wukong is tough on graphics cards even before we apply its RT presets, and Very High RT crushes everything into dust with native rendering. Even then, the game favors GeForce cards to such a degree that you'd need a massive dose of upscaling to reach playability with Very High RT on Radeons, even at 1080p.
Assassin's Creed Shadows
A new title for our 2026 GPU Hierarchy testing, Assassin's Creed Shadows boasts gorgeous RT visuals that make for a major upgrade when they're enabled. And it does all this without putting major pressure on VRAM.
As with many of our other RT titles, though, Shadows really seems to expect you to dial in upscaling (and maybe even some framegen) to achieve smooth frame rates, and the 9070 GRE provides a strong enough foundation for that purpose if you consider 1080p an input resolution for FSR 4 Performance at 4K, for just one of many potential examples.
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2
Enabling RT in Spider-Man 2 greatly improves the appearance of reflections on the many glass-clad buildings you'll swing by in its New York City setting, so it's worth the performance hit in our eyes. But the RX 9070 GRE's 12GB of VRAM already seems to be holding it back in this game at 1080p, as it isn't performing much better than the RX 9060 XT 16GB and RX 7800 XT. And the 9060 XT 16GB even outperforms the GRE at 4K.
Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced
It’s hard to believe we’re still testing Grand Theft Auto V more than 10 years after its arrival on the PC, but here we are. The latest Enhanced re-release adds appealing RT eye candy to Los Santos, and its demands on hardware are modest enough that even modest hardware can provide a solid enough performance foundation for upscaling.
Even with that in mind, GTA V produces some... interesting results on our cards. Radeon RX 9000-series products suffer from a major frame rate drop partway through our run, and that results in much lower 1% lows compared to RX 7000-series cards, which don't experience the same issue. (And neither do RX 6000-series cards, even though they're not shown here.) We've watched this issue persist for many months, and it doesn't speak well for AMD's latest-gen graphics cards that it's lingered this long.
GeForces aren't immune to weird performance in this title either, however. At 1080p and 1440p, higher-end RTX cards seem to suffer from some weird potential CPU-boundedness, and that also appears as a wide gap between average frame rates and 1% lows in our charts. But unlike the RX 9000-series cards, those drops are only perceptible as slight stutters rather than an extended, painful dip. Raise the resolution to 1440p or especially 4K, and those stutters lessen or go away.
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Used alongside the FrameView software that we use to capture performance results, Nvidia’s PCAT hardware allows us to capture live power consumption data with every frame, and we can use that data to communicate real-world power usage figures that are more precise than a worst-case total board power rating.
Power consumption taken in isolation doesn't mean much, though. A card can be both highly efficient and still draw a lot of power to turn in a high overall performance level, and it can also draw a modest amount of power and still deliver relatively low performance per watt.
To express power efficiency, we simply divide a card's average frames per second by its average power consumption across all of our tests. We stuck with our 1080p results for this analysis, as these cards' relatively low performance at 1440p and 4K would make efficiency discussions with those results more academic than anything.
By this measure, the RTX 5050 is much more efficient than the Ampere-powered RTX 3050, but it’s disappointingly inefficient for a Blackwell card. The RTX 5060 turns in 20% higher frames per watt at 1080p, and the RTX 5060 Ti duo is even better still. Any generational efficiency gains Nvidia made in the GB207 GPU on the RTX 5050 appear to be offset entirely by sticking with fast GDDR6 memory at the board level. On net, we end up with efficiency even slightly worse than that of the RTX 4060.
For reference, we've also included the geomean of clock speeds and temperatures across all our cards at the tested resolutions. Some data is missing due to driver and/or software hiccups, which we'll correct in future testing.
We don't think there are any surprises in these results. The RTX 5050 clocks much higher than its rated boost speed, a testament to Nvidia's GPU Boost logic and the thermal and electrical headroom that even this modest card apparently boasts.
The Gigabyte card is the hottest-running of this bunch, but it's also got one of the smallest coolers among the cards we tested, and it's still well below any level that would represent cause for concern.
