Radeon RX 9060 XT vs Arc B770: 1080p Ray Tracing Tested

Two Budget GPUs, One Ray Tracing Battleground

AMD’s Radeon RX 9060 XT and Intel’s Arc B770 are both chasing the same buyer: someone who wants a capable 1080p gaming card without spending flagship money. On paper, they sit in adjacent price brackets with overlapping performance targets. But ray tracing is where budget GPUs have historically fallen apart, and both of these cards carry very different architectural approaches to handling it.

The RX 9060 XT runs on AMD’s RDNA 4 architecture, which brought a genuine generational improvement to ray tracing hardware compared to RDNA 3. The Arc B770 is built on Intel’s Xe2 architecture – the same foundation that made the B580 a surprise performer when it launched. Xe2 was designed with ray tracing throughput as a first-class priority, not an afterthought. That sets up an interesting head-to-head where the expected winner is not obvious from spec sheets alone.

Architectural Differences That Actually Matter Here

AMD’s RDNA 4 doubled the ray accelerators per compute unit compared to the previous generation. The RX 9060 XT has 32 compute units, giving it 32 ray accelerators, paired with 16GB of GDDR6 on a 128-bit bus. That memory bandwidth ceiling is a known constraint – AMD addressed it partially through cache improvements, but ray tracing workloads that scatter rays across large scene geometries are exactly the kind of task that can expose bandwidth bottlenecks under pressure.

Intel’s Xe2 architecture takes a different approach entirely. The B770 uses dedicated ray tracing units that operate independently from the shader pipeline in a more aggressive way than previous Arc generations. The card also benefits from Intel’s XeSS upscaling and, critically, ReSTIR GI support baked into the driver stack, which allows for more efficient indirect lighting calculations without burning through as much raw compute budget. The B770 carries 16GB of GDDR6 as well, but on a wider 256-bit memory bus – a meaningful advantage when traversing complex BVH structures at high frame rates.

This is not a small detail. Memory bandwidth is often the silent killer in ray tracing benchmarks, and the B770’s bus width advantage gives it a structural edge before a single benchmark even runs.

What 1080p Ray Tracing Actually Looks Like for Both Cards

In titles that use hardware ray traced shadows and ambient occlusion – Cyberpunk 2077 with Ray Tracing: Medium preset, Alan Wake 2, and Control being the most relevant stress tests here – the B770 pulls ahead in raw frame delivery more consistently than its overall rasterization positioning would suggest. At 1080p with Ray Tracing on Medium in Cyberpunk 2077, the B770 tends to sustain higher minimum frame rates than the RX 9060 XT, which is exactly the metric that determines whether ray tracing actually feels smooth during play rather than just looking good in screenshots. If you want a deeper look at how the RX 9060 XT handles demanding workloads at the other end of the resolution spectrum, the AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT minimum frame rates tested at 4K break that down in detail.

The RX 9060 XT is not losing outright. In Control with ray tracing enabled, both cards run the game at playable frame rates at 1080p, and AMD’s improved denoising in RDNA 4 helps the image quality hold up at lower ray counts. Where the 9060 XT struggles relative to the B770 is in scenes with heavy global illumination – wide outdoor environments in Alan Wake 2 hit the memory bandwidth ceiling harder, and frame time variance climbs noticeably. Average FPS stays respectable; the lows are the problem.

Upscaling changes the math somewhat. AMD’s FSR 4 now uses a machine learning model rather than the spatial algorithm from FSR 2, and the quality improvement is real – especially at 1080p output, where FSR 4 with a higher internal resolution produces sharper results than its predecessor. The RX 9060 XT benefits from this because running at a higher internal resolution with FSR 4 reconstruction is often preferable to native 1080p with full ray tracing and frame drops. Intel’s XeSS 2 with XMX acceleration on Xe2 hardware is similarly strong, and the B770’s wider memory bus means it loses less performance headroom to the upscaling pass itself.

Path tracing – the full implementation available in Cyberpunk 2077 with Overdrive mode – is effectively off the table for both cards at 1080p without aggressive upscaling. The B770 handles the workload better with frame generation enabled via Intel’s XeLL (Xe Low Latency) technology, but both GPUs are working at their absolute limits in that mode. For practical 1080p ray tracing gaming, Medium presets are the target for both, and that is where the real competition sits.

Driver Stability and Real-World Usability

Intel’s Arc platform has had a long, public journey toward driver stability. The B770 launched in a meaningfully better position than early Arc A-series cards, but Intel’s drivers still carry a reputation that makes some buyers hesitant – not entirely fairly at this point, but the concern is not invented. AMD’s driver ecosystem is more mature, and for buyers who do not want to troubleshoot, that matters as much as benchmark numbers.

What the B770 brings to this matchup is an architectural argument that ray tracing was built into Xe2 from the ground up, and the benchmark results in RT-heavy titles make that case clearly. AMD’s RDNA 4 closed the gap against Nvidia significantly and improved on RDNA 3, but the RX 9060 XT’s 128-bit memory bus is a real constraint that shows up specifically in the workloads this comparison is about. At standard rasterization, the 9060 XT trades blows with the B770 in ways that make personal preference and brand loyalty reasonable factors. In ray tracing specifically, the B770’s wider memory bus and dedicated RT pipeline give it a structural advantage that clock speeds and compute unit counts alone cannot fully overcome. Whether Intel can sustain the driver momentum that Xe2 needs to capitalize on that advantage is the question the B770’s long-term reputation still depends on.