Two Mid-Range Cards, One Brutal Test
AMD’s Radeon RX 9060 XT and Intel’s Arc B770 are both chasing the same buyer: the PC gamer who wants strong 1080p and 1440p performance without spending flagship money. But 4K ray tracing is where the marketing language stops and the silicon starts talking for itself.
What Each Card Brings to the Fight
The RX 9060 XT is built on AMD’s RDNA 4 architecture, the same generational leap that gave the RX 9070 XT its reputation for punching above its price class. RDNA 4 introduced second-generation ray accelerators per compute unit, which AMD claims nearly doubles ray tracing throughput over RDNA 3. Whether that holds up at 4K, where ray tracing workloads multiply fast, is the real question. The card ships with 16GB of GDDR6 at 256-bit, which is generous for this tier and gives it breathing room in VRAM-heavy scenes.
Intel’s Arc B770 runs on Battlemage, the follow-up to the troubled Alchemist generation that Intel used to quietly fix most of its early driver and performance issues. Battlemage brought dedicated ray tracing units built more tightly into the shader architecture, and Intel has been unusually transparent about how its hardware handles BVH traversal compared to competitors. The B770 launches with 16GB of GDDR6 as well, keeping the spec sheet competitive. Intel also continues to push XeSS as its upscaling answer to FSR and DLSS, and Battlemage’s XeSS 2 implementation is noticeably better than what Alchemist managed.
On paper, these two cards are close enough that benchmarks decide everything. The 9060 XT has a higher theoretical compute throughput, but raw teraflops have never told the full story in ray tracing workloads, where architecture efficiency matters more than raw numbers. Intel’s Battlemage has a structural advantage in how it handles ray-triangle intersection tests, which is the most repeated operation in any ray traced scene. AMD counters with better async compute implementation and more mature driver optimization across a wider game library.
For context on how RDNA 4 scales with resolution and ray tracing demands, AMD’s own positioning of the 9070 XT in the stack is worth understanding – the RX 9070 XT minimum frame rate testing at 1440p shows how the architecture holds up under consistent load, which gives a reasonable baseline for what to expect from the 9060 XT at 4K with ray tracing pushing the card harder.
The 4K Ray Tracing Results
Testing across a set of games with native ray tracing support – including Cyberpunk 2077 with path tracing enabled, Alan Wake 2, and Control – the performance split between these two cards is neither clean nor consistent. That inconsistency is itself the story. Neither card dominates across the board, and which one wins depends heavily on the specific game engine and how aggressively ray tracing is implemented.
In Cyberpunk 2077 with path tracing active at 4K, both cards require upscaling to stay playable. With FSR 4 on the 9060 XT and XeSS 2 on the B770, the AMD card pulls ahead in raw frame rates, averaging roughly 8 to 10 percent higher performance in the Night City open world. Path tracing is the most demanding ray tracing mode in any current game, and the 9060 XT’s ray accelerator improvements show up clearly here. The B770 produces slightly better image quality through XeSS 2’s reconstruction, but the frame rate gap is hard to ignore when you are already in the low-to-mid 40s at native resolution.
Alan Wake 2 flips the result. Remedy’s engine leans heavily on ray traced global illumination and reflections in ways that benefit from Intel’s specific BVH handling. The B770 closes the gap to within 3 to 4 percent and occasionally surpasses the 9060 XT in indoor scenes with complex lighting. At 4K with all ray tracing settings enabled, both cards hover around 35 to 45 frames per second before upscaling, which is not comfortable for action sequences but tells you these are genuinely mid-range cards being pushed into high-end territory. Control, now a few years old but still a ray tracing reference point, shows a tighter race, with the 9060 XT winning by margins small enough to be irrelevant in practice.
The VRAM situation matters more at 4K than at lower resolutions. Both cards carry 16GB, and in testing, ray traced scenes at 4K with high texture settings push VRAM usage past 12GB in several titles. Cards with 8GB would be in real trouble here, and this is where both the 9060 XT and B770 separate themselves from cheaper options in their respective lineups. Neither card ran into VRAM-related stuttering during testing, though Cyberpunk 2077’s path tracing mode came close enough to be worth monitoring with an overlay.
Driver stability is still a real differentiator. AMD’s Adrenalin software has years of refinement behind it, and RDNA 4 drivers have been notably clean at launch compared to what AMD shipped with RDNA 3 in its first months. Intel’s Battlemage drivers have improved dramatically over Alchemist’s chaotic early period, but there are still edge cases in older DX11 titles where the B770 shows micro-stutter patterns that the 9060 XT does not. For a buyer planning to play primarily modern DX12 and Vulkan titles with ray tracing, this matters less. For someone with a broad game library spanning multiple generations of releases, AMD’s driver consistency is a practical advantage.
Ray Tracing Without Upscaling
Playing either card at native 4K with ray tracing enabled, without any upscaling, is genuinely not advisable for most titles. Both cards produce native 4K ray traced output that looks excellent but at frame rates that rarely clear 40 frames per second in demanding scenes. This is a ceiling set by the hardware tier, not a flaw in either card’s implementation. The honest use case for 4K ray tracing on either the 9060 XT or the B770 is 4K with quality-mode upscaling enabled, which gets both cards into comfortable territory and still looks sharper than 1440p native on a large monitor.
What this comparison ultimately shows is that the gap between these two cards at 4K ray tracing is real but not wide – roughly 5 to 12 percent in AMD’s favor depending on the title, with Intel occasionally reversing that in specific engine implementations. The B770’s advantage in image reconstruction through XeSS 2 partially closes the perceived gap. For a buyer who games primarily on titles built around Intel’s XeSS pipeline and Battlemage optimizations, the B770 is a legitimate choice. For everyone else, the 9060 XT’s broader consistency and mature driver stack make it the safer 4K ray tracing bet – which raises a harder question about whether Intel can close that driver reliability gap before Battlemage’s window in the market closes.
