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Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti Ray Tracing Gaming Performance
The RTX 5070 Ti should, if anything, do even better in games with ray tracing enabled. Nvidia was the driving force behind the creation of dedicated ray tracing hardware, which influences the DirectX Raytracing (DXR) and Vulkan Ray Tracing APIs. It all started with the Turing RTX 20-series GPUs, with each subsequent generation doubling the ray/triangle intersection calculation rates (per RT core).
Most RT games end up being better optimized for Nvidia GPUs, because 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 / DLSS 4 testing on the next page.
The RTX 5070 Ti mostly delivers the expected gains in ray tracing performance, with the exception of Minecraft where there's a driver bug of some form that severely impacts performance — particularly at 1080p and 1440p "ultra" settings. (It doesn't happen on our older 13900K testbed, so it seems to be related to AMD's 9800X3D and socket AM5 platform in some way.) Control also bumps into its 240 FPS limit at 1080p medium settings, which brings down the overall average.
Overall, the 5070 Ti offers up to 25% higher performance on average compared to the 4070 Ti, but only up to 11% higher performance than the 4070 Ti Super. It's also up to 30% faster than the 7900 XTX. And that's with the sometimes underperforming Minecraft results.
Toss the Minecraft data out and the 5070 Ti sees a more consistent 9–13 percent performance improvement over the 4070 Ti Super, 13–24 percent better performance than the 4070 Ti, and 18–22 percent higher framerates than the 7900 XTX. (Minecraft can help or hurt, depending on the resolution and settings, as it otherwise pushes a lot of RT effects and usually runs much better on Nvidia GPUs.)
Outside of Minecraft, these games only do modest amounts of RT. We'll be checking some full RT games on the next page (in the future) to show how the 5070 Ti Blackwell GPU fares against its progenitors in a heavier RT scenario.
Here are the combined rasterization plus ray tracing overall results charts. These charts use the geomean of all 22 games we tested, with RT accounting for slightly more than a quarter of the overall score.
Looking at the wide-angle view of GPU performance this way, the 5070 Ti does come out slightly ahead of AMD's 7900 XTX. It's only by 3–5 percent overall, though, so it's still basically a tie on performance. Except, the Nvidia card costs less, uses less power, and has some extra features that AMD's GPU lacks.
Meanwhile, the RTX 4070 Ti and 4070 Ti Super stories don't really change. The 5070 Ti delivers the largest gains at 4K ultra, where it's up to 25% faster than the 4070 Ti and 13% faster than the 4070 Ti Super.
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 impacts the 1080p results. (This game is on my 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. It's also currently the only game with a public release that supports DLSS 4.
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 by quite a lot — especially at 1080p, less so at 1440p. 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 like the 4070 Ti 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. We've retested the 5090 and 5080 this round.
The results, as expected, have AMD's fastest GPU at the bottom of our test group. It was already slower than the 4070 Ti, so there was no reason to expect it to beat the 5070 Ti.
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