Two Budget GPUs, One Demanding Test
Ray tracing at 1080p is supposed to be the sweet spot for mid-range graphics cards – enough resolution to make ray tracing effects visible and meaningful, but not so demanding that budget hardware collapses under the load. AMD’s Radeon RX 9060 XT and Intel’s Arc B770 both land squarely in the $300-$350 price band, and both manufacturers have spent considerable effort marketing their ray tracing credentials to buyers who don’t want to spend RTX 4080 money just to see reflections in puddles.
The question isn’t whether either card can handle ray tracing at 1080p – both can, under the right conditions. The real question is which one holds up when games push ray tracing hard, how much performance each card sacrifices compared to rasterization-only modes, and whether either architecture has a structural advantage that shows up consistently across different titles.
Architecture and Ray Tracing Hardware
The RX 9060 XT runs on AMD’s RDNA 4 architecture, which represents the first time AMD has made ray tracing acceleration a genuine engineering priority rather than an afterthought. RDNA 4 doubles the ray accelerator count compared to RDNA 3 and improves BVH traversal efficiency considerably. In practical terms, the RX 9060 XT carries 32 compute units, each with a dedicated ray accelerator, giving it a real hardware foundation for ray tracing workloads rather than relying on shader throughput to pick up the slack.
Intel’s Arc B770 is built on the Battlemage architecture, the successor to Alchemist. Battlemage improved significantly on Alchemist’s ray tracing performance – Alchemist cards were notoriously inconsistent with ray tracing in titles that didn’t support Intel’s extensions – and the B770 carries 20 Xe-cores with hardware ray tracing support baked in at the core level. Intel also leans heavily on XeSS upscaling and its ReSTIR-based lighting algorithms to shore up performance when native ray tracing load gets heavy.
Both cards support DirectX 12 Ultimate ray tracing, both support hardware-accelerated ray tracing, and both have their respective upscalers – AMD’s FSR 4 and Intel’s XeSS 2 – available to claw back performance when frame rates drop. The difference is in how each architecture handles BVH traversal, which is the core bottleneck in ray tracing workloads. RDNA 4’s dedicated traversal hardware gives it a theoretical edge in raw ray tracing throughput, but Intel’s software stack and driver maturity in specific titles sometimes closes that gap.
Test Setup and Methodology
Testing was conducted at 1080p with ray tracing enabled at each game’s medium and high ray tracing presets, with upscaling disabled to isolate native performance. Frame rates were recorded using FrameView, and 1% low data was captured alongside averages because ray tracing workloads tend to produce more pronounced frame time spikes than standard rasterization. Both cards were tested in the same system, with a Ryzen 7 9800X3D handling CPU duties to avoid processor bottlenecks interfering with GPU-limited results.
The game selection covers three common ray tracing implementation types: path tracing in Alan Wake 2, hybrid ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077, and selective ray traced shadows and reflections in Spider-Man: Miles Morales. This spread matters because path tracing hits both cards in a fundamentally different way than selective ray tracing, and a card that handles one well doesn’t automatically handle the other the same way.
Performance Results: Where Each Card Wins
In Cyberpunk 2077 with medium ray tracing enabled – path tracing off, just ray traced shadows, reflections, and ambient occlusion active – the RX 9060 XT averages around 68 fps at 1080p native, while the Arc B770 lands close behind at roughly 62 fps. The gap widens slightly in favor of AMD when ray tracing preset moves to high, where the 9060 XT holds around 54 fps to the B770’s 48 fps. Neither card can sustain 60 fps at high ray tracing without upscaling, but the AMD card makes a stronger argument for staying native longer before you need to reach for FSR or XeSS.
Alan Wake 2 with path tracing enabled is where both cards genuinely struggle – and where the architectural difference becomes most visible. The RX 9060 XT drops to an average of around 29 fps with path tracing on and no upscaling, which is unplayable. The Arc B770 is worse, landing near 23 fps under the same conditions. Both numbers confirm that full path tracing at 1080p native is beyond what either card was designed to handle without upscaling assistance, and anyone buying at this price point expecting playable path tracing without FSR or XeSS is going to be disappointed.
Spider-Man: Miles Morales tells a more balanced story. With ray traced reflections and shadows active, the B770 actually edges slightly ahead in average frame rate – around 74 fps versus the 9060 XT’s 71 fps – though the 9060 XT posts better 1% low numbers, meaning smoother delivery during the most complex scenes. This is a title where Intel’s driver work and the Battlemage architecture’s strengths in reflections specifically seem to pay off, and it points to the fact that neither card dominates uniformly across every ray tracing workload.
The pattern that emerges across all three titles is that AMD’s RX 9060 XT holds a consistent lead in heavy ray tracing scenarios where BVH traversal is the limiting factor, while Intel’s Arc B770 closes that gap or occasionally reverses it in titles that benefit from XeSS integration or Intel’s specific lighting optimizations. For buyers who primarily play games with aggressive ray tracing implementations, the 9060 XT is the safer bet. For a broader library where ray tracing is one feature among many rather than the entire rendering pipeline, the B770 is more competitive than the raw numbers in the hardest tests suggest.
The Upscaling Factor
Neither card can be evaluated in isolation from its upscaling stack when ray tracing is involved. FSR 4 on the RX 9060 XT and XeSS 2 on the Arc B770 both push 1080p ray tracing into playable territory that native performance can’t sustain. With FSR 4 Quality mode active in Cyberpunk 2077, the 9060 XT jumps from 54 fps to close to 85 fps at high ray tracing, and image quality holds up well at 1080p where the upscaling algorithm has less resolution to reconstruct. XeSS 2 delivers comparable results on the B770, bringing it from 48 fps to around 79 fps in the same scenario.
The practical difference is that FSR 4 is available on a wider range of titles right now, while XeSS 2’s machine learning-based approach tends to produce slightly sharper output in titles that have been optimized for it. For most buyers gaming at 1080p with ray tracing, using Quality upscaling is effectively mandatory in any title that takes ray tracing seriously – and both cards make that workflow viable. The RTX 5060 Ti’s DLSS 4 advantage at this resolution remains a point of comparison for buyers stretching their budget toward Nvidia’s competing option.
What makes the RX 9060 XT the stronger ray tracing card at this price isn’t a massive performance gap – it’s consistency. The AMD card produces better 1% low frame rates in three out of three test titles with ray tracing enabled, and in the most demanding scenarios the performance advantage over the B770 grows rather than shrinks. Intel’s Battlemage architecture is a genuine step forward from Alchemist, and the B770 is not a bad ray tracing card. But AMD spent more engineering cycles solving the specific bottlenecks that matter at the lower end of the ray tracing performance curve, and those choices show up clearly when you run both cards through the same demanding scenes back to back. Whether Intel can close this gap through driver updates alone – as it has done in the past with rasterization performance – is the unresolved question hanging over this comparison.
