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AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 Ray Tracing Gaming Performance
Ray tracing can be extremely demanding, and it's traditionally been a weak point for AMD's GPUs. However, the RDNA 4 architecture promises improved RT performance, so now we get to see how it actually fares. AMD even said the 9070 XT should beat the previous generation RX 7900 XTX in RT performance, which means it should be fairly competitive with the 5070 at least.
We're running native rendering for our tests, which is more than most GPUs can handle at 4K in particular. The RTX 5090 and perhaps 4090 can manage that, but mainstream GPUs? Not so much.
The more demanding RT games are usually better optimized for Nvidia GPUs, and often Nvidia promoted. That's no surprise as Nvidia has been pushing the tech far more than AMD or Intel. We've selected six reasonably demanding RT games for our testing, and we'll add additional supplemental RT / full RT / upscaling / framegen testing on the next page (in the future).
Again, there are multiple interesting comparisons. New AMD versus old AMD, the 9070 XT delivers 10–12 percent higher performance on average across our test resolutions compared to the RX 7900 XTX. Only Avatar — a lighter RT game as far as graphics effects go — runs faster on the XTX card. Elsewhere, Cyberpunk 2077 runs around 25% faster on the 9070 XT. And relative to the 7900 XT, the 9070 XT is 22–32 percent faster.
Looking at the two 9070-series cards, the 9070 XT gets a slightly larger lead in ray tracing than it did in rasterization performance. It's 12–19 percent faster, so again, for 9% more money it's the clearly better option. That's assuming MSRPs have any real meaning, of course.
So, AMD has clearly improved its ray tracing performance compared to RDNA 3, by quite a lot. 64 RT accelerators in the 9070 XT outperform 96 previous gen RT accelerators in the 7900 XTX. But is that enough to compete with Nvidia's cards? The 9070 XT doesn't quite manage to take down the RTX 5070 Ti, but it's closer than we've seen in the past. It's 13% slower at 4K, 9% slower at 1440p, and 11% slower at 1080p medium — and nearly tied at 1080p ultra, but that's because Nvidia's 50-series has issues with Minecraft at 1080p "ultra."
But while AMD couldn't take down the higher tier 5070 Ti, the RTX 5070 is a different matter. Nvidia's new mainstream card does get slightly higher performance in Minecraft (except at 1080p ultra where performance on Nvidia is again terrible), but everywhere else the 9070 XT gets a clear win. It's 16–20 percent faster overall at our ultra settings, and 10% faster at 1080p medium. For a potential 9% increase in price, it's again the clear winner — though obviously DLSS and other software are still factors to consider.
And finally, we have the RX 9070 versus RTX 5070. AMD got the win in rasterization performance while Nvidia gets a slight win here. And we do mean slight. The 9070 is 4% slower at 1080p medium, only 1% slower at 1440p and 4K — likely thanks to having 16GB — and 5% faster at 1080p ultra where Nvidia's poor Minecraft result still skews the numbers.
Combining all 22 game results into a single chart, the RX 9070 XT is basically tied in overall performance with the RX 7900 XTX, and 10–17 percent faster than the RX 7900 XT. Not surprisingly, since they're using the same architecture, the gap between the 9070 XT and 9070 cards remains pretty consistent, with the XT being 9–16 percent faster overall. If it hasn't been abundantly clear already, the 9070 XT is the obviously the better choice based on performance and MSRP.
Against Nvidia, the RX 9070 XT ultimately ends up slightly slower than the RTX 5070 Ti overall. It loses by 5% at 4K, 4% at 1440p, and 3% at 1080p. But again, on paper, it's 20% cheaper, so that's not a bad tradeoff. Naturally, that means the 9070 XT gets a big win over the vanilla 5070. The 9070 XT is 9–16 percent faster than the 5070, with a larger lead at the higher resolutions.
The RX 9070 ends up a lot closer to its direct competitor. It gets the win, but not by a huge margin: 4% at 1080p, 5% at 1440p, and 8% at 4K. And at that point, barring major differences in real-world pricing, it's close enough that the extras on offer from Nvidia like DLSS, Broadcast, etc. could sway the choice. Still, you do get 33% more VRAM with AMD's card.
The individual RT gaming charts follow, again with limited commentary on each.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora uses ray tracing, but it's not particularly forthcoming on when and where it's used. Reflections, in general, don't appear to use RT, which is one of the most noticeable upgrades RT can provide. Instead, it's used for shadows and possibly global illumination and some other effects. What I can say for sure is that nothing in the menus (other than "BVH Quality") directly mentions ray tracing, and the performance hit doesn't seem to be as severe as in some games. Still, since there's RT of some form, this one gets lumped into our DXR suite.
If you want a game where ray tracing is both clearly visible and actually makes the game look better, without totally destroying performance, look no further than Control. It's now five years old, and we're using the Ultimate version, but it's still arguably the best example of using RT well. And probably a lot of that is because you're running around the Federal Bureau of Control, an office space of sorts that has good reasons to have plenty of glass windows that reflect the scenery.
Note that Nvidia's RTX 50-series GPUs have some rendering errors in Control right now, and there's a hard 240 FPS cap that can impact the 1080p results. (This game is on the chopping block if I decide I want to trim down the number of tests I'm running.)
Possibly the most hyped-up use of RT in a game, Cyberpunk 2077 launched with more RT effects than other games of its era, and later, the 2.0 version added full path tracing and DLSS 3.5 ray reconstruction. Ray reconstruction ends up looking the best but only works on Nvidia GPUs, so, as with upscaling, it can be a case of trying to compare apples and oranges.
We're using medium settings with RT lighting at medium and RT reflections enabled, and then the step up uses the RT-Ultra preset. In all cases, any form of upscaling or frame generation gets turned off. However, we'll have more details on Cyberpunk 2077 with RT-Overdrive on the next page (eventually).
F1 24 enables several RT effects on the ultra preset but leaves them off on medium. But then 1080p medium runs at hundreds of frames per second, so we went ahead and turned all the RT effects on for our testing. We use the Great Britain track for testing.
Minecraft supports full path tracing, as well as DLSS 2 upscaling on RTX cards. We don't enable DLSS, and the game doesn't even allow it on the RTX 50-series GPUs right now. Apparently, it has some sort of hard-coded check for an RTX 20-, 30-, or 40-series GPU is our best guess. Or it's just a driver bug of some form.
The 50-series GPUs also underperform in Minecraft, especially at 1080p and less so at 1440p and 4K (the 'medium' results are mostly okay). Nvidia is aware of the problem and presumably working on a fix, but we've been saying that for over a month now.
Last on our list of RT-enabled games, Spider-Man: Miles Morales doesn't look as nice with RT turned on as the previous Spider-Man: Remastered. The reflections are less obvious, and perhaps performance is better as a result. But beyond the RT effects, maxing out the settings in Miles Morales definitely needs more than 8GB of VRAM, and even 12GB cards can struggle at times.
One final ray tracing benchmark we have is the 3DMark DXR Feature Test, where we report the average FPS rather than the calculated score. This is similar to full RT in a game, only done via a standalone benchmark and perhaps in a more vendor-agnostic fashion. Nvidia has also fixed a bug here that was causing Blackwell 50-series GPUs to underperform.
Interestingly, in the "pure" RT performance of 3DMark's DXR Feature Test, the 7900 XTX still comes out slightly ahead of the 9070 XT. The RTX 5070 also comes out ahead of the 7900 XTX. So, if the hope was that this would be a more neutral view of ray tracing potential, it doesn't quite show what we expected to see.
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