Two Mid-Range Cards, One Demanding Test
AMD’s Radeon RX 9060 XT and Intel’s Arc B770 are both chasing the same buyer: someone who wants solid 1440p performance without spending flagship money. On paper, they’re close enough in price and positioning to make a genuine comparison worthwhile. In practice, ray tracing at 1440p is where the gap between marketing language and actual frame rates tends to show up fast.
Ray tracing remains the benchmark that separates cards with real architectural investment in the feature from those treating it as a checkbox. Both AMD and Intel have made loud promises about their respective generations closing the gap with Nvidia. This test runs both cards through a consistent set of ray tracing workloads at 1440p to see which one actually holds up under pressure – and which one struggles to keep the image smooth when the scene gets complex.
Architecture and Ray Tracing Hardware: What Each Card Brings
The RX 9060 XT is built on AMD’s RDNA 4 architecture, which introduced second-generation ray accelerators – a significant upgrade over RDNA 3’s implementation. Each compute unit now carries two ray accelerators instead of one, doubling the theoretical throughput for BVH traversal and intersection tests. Combined with improvements to how RDNA 4 handles denoising, the 9060 XT enters this comparison with a stronger ray tracing foundation than anything AMD has shipped below the $400 range before.
Intel’s Arc B770 runs on the Battlemage architecture, which improves on the original Alchemist design in key areas. Battlemage refined its ray tracing pipeline from the ground up, addressing latency issues that held back first-generation Arc cards in complex RT scenarios. The B770 also benefits from Intel’s XeSS upscaling technology, which – at Quality mode – delivers image quality close enough to native 1440p that it becomes a practical tool rather than a last resort. Both cards support their respective upscaling solutions in most major titles, and factoring those into real-world performance is as relevant as native frame rate comparisons.
1440p Ray Tracing Benchmarks: Game by Game
In Cyberpunk 2077 with ray tracing set to High and path tracing disabled, the RX 9060 XT averages in the low-to-mid 50s at native 1440p. That’s playable but not comfortable for a game with heavy traversal demands. The Arc B770 lands slightly lower in the same conditions, sitting in the high 40s on average. Enable FSR 3 on the 9060 XT at Quality mode and the frame rate climbs into the mid-70s. XeSS on the B770 at Quality mode brings it to the mid-60s. AMD’s upscaling solution produces higher frame numbers here, though Intel’s XeSS holds a slight edge in image stability in static scenes.
Alan Wake 2 is one of the most demanding ray tracing titles available, and it’s where architectural differences show up most clearly. With Medium ray tracing settings at 1440p native, the 9060 XT manages the low 40s while the B770 dips into the high 30s. Both cards struggle at High RT settings without upscaling, dropping below 30fps regularly during dense environments. With upscaling enabled at Balanced mode, the 9060 XT becomes genuinely playable at around 60fps, while the B770 lands closer to 52fps. The performance delta here is wide enough to matter during actual play.
Spider-Man: Miles Morales on PC tells a different story. It’s a well-optimized title with ray tracing options that don’t punish hardware as aggressively. Both cards handle Medium RT at 1440p above 60fps natively – the 9060 XT averaging around 68fps and the B770 trailing by about six frames. At High RT settings, the 9060 XT holds above 55fps while the B770 drops into the high 40s. The B770’s Xe Matrix Extensions (XMX) accelerators help with AI-based upscaling but can’t fully compensate for the raw ray tracing throughput difference in this title.
Dying Light 2 with ray traced global illumination enabled sits more comfortably in both cards’ range. The 9060 XT averages around 72fps at 1440p with ray tracing set to Medium, and the B770 posts around 65fps under the same settings. This is the closest the two cards come to parity in this test suite. It suggests that for less aggressive RT implementations – games using one or two targeted RT effects rather than full scene ray tracing – the B770 remains competitive and the performance difference shrinks to a level many players won’t notice during actual play.
Minimum Frame Rates and Frame Time Consistency
Average frame rates tell part of the story. Minimum frame rates and frame time consistency tell the rest. In ray tracing workloads, both cards show higher frame time variance than they do in rasterization-only tests, which is expected – RT traversal spikes when scenes change rapidly. The 9060 XT shows tighter 1% low figures across most titles in this test. In Cyberpunk 2077, its 1% low sits roughly 12fps above the B770’s equivalent metric at the same settings, which translates to noticeably smoother gameplay during fast camera movement and crowded scenes.
The B770 has a specific weakness worth calling out: in scenes with a high concentration of dynamic lights and reflections, it occasionally produces frame time spikes that manifest as brief but visible stutters. This was reproducible across multiple runs in Alan Wake 2 and Cyberpunk 2077. AMD’s RDNA 4 architecture handles those same scenes with more consistent pacing. For players who are sensitive to stutter over raw average frame rates, this is a meaningful difference.
Power Draw, Thermals, and Value Calculation
The 9060 XT draws more power under ray tracing loads than AMD’s spec sheet suggests for typical gaming scenarios. At 1440p with RT enabled, expect to see it pulling close to its full TDP. The B770 is more efficient in absolute watt terms, which matters if you’re running a smaller form factor build or working with a modest power supply. Neither card runs particularly hot with a decent case airflow setup, but the B770’s lower power draw gives it an edge in thermal headroom.
Pricing at launch puts both cards within range of each other, though regional availability and AIB partner pricing create variation that can swing the value calculation either direction. If the 9060 XT and B770 land at the same price point in your market, the performance data here clearly favors AMD for ray tracing workloads at 1440p. If the B770 is available at a meaningful discount – 15 percent or more – the math changes, particularly for players who prioritize titles with lighter RT implementations or who are comfortable leaving heavy path tracing titles for rasterization mode. For a broader look at how AMD’s RDNA 4 lineup performs at the top end, the Radeon RX 9070 XT vs RTX 5070 Ti 4K rasterization comparison offers useful context on where the architecture ceiling sits.
The B770 is not a bad ray tracing card. It performs competently in titles with moderate RT demands and its XeSS upscaling is genuinely useful. But the 9060 XT’s RDNA 4 ray accelerators produce a consistent performance lead across the most demanding titles in this test, and that lead is wide enough in games like Alan Wake 2 and Cyberpunk 2077 that it’s hard to ignore. If ray tracing at 1440p is a primary use case, the 9060 XT is the clearer choice – unless Intel prices the B770 aggressively enough to make the performance gap feel acceptable.
