Two Mid-Range Cards, One Ray Tracing Battleground
AMD’s Radeon RX 9060 XT and Intel’s Arc B770 are both targeting the same buyer: someone who wants capable 1080p gaming without paying flagship prices. Ray tracing is where the gap between them gets interesting – and not always in the direction you’d expect.
What Each Card Brings to Ray Tracing at 1080p
The RX 9060 XT launches on AMD’s RDNA 4 architecture, which marks the first time AMD has seriously invested in dedicated ray tracing hardware rather than treating it as a secondary feature bolted onto rasterization cores. RDNA 4 doubles the ray accelerators per compute unit compared to RDNA 3, and that matters significantly in scenes with dense reflection and shadow calculations. At 1080p, the card has enough headroom to handle ray tracing without the resolution pressure that makes the feature brutal at 4K.
Intel’s Arc B770 runs on the Battlemage architecture, and ray tracing has been a stated priority for Intel since the original Alchemist generation. Battlemage refines the approach with improved BVH traversal performance and better driver-level optimization for DirectX Raytracing workloads. The B770 sits above the B580 in Intel’s mid-range stack and brings higher core counts and more memory bandwidth to bear – which helps in ray tracing scenes where data throughput is the actual bottleneck, not raw shader power.
In titles like Cyberpunk 2077 with ray tracing set to High and path tracing disabled, the RX 9060 XT holds a consistent lead in raw frame rates at 1080p. The gap tends to sit in the range of 8-12 frames per second across outdoor city sequences, though it narrows noticeably in interior scenes with heavy shadow casting. The B770 is not being crushed here – it delivers playable performance – but AMD’s newer ray tracing hardware does show its advantages when the workload gets complex.
Path tracing is a different story. In Alan Wake 2 with full path tracing enabled at 1080p without upscaling, both cards are pushed to their limits. The RX 9060 XT stays above 30 fps more consistently, while the B770 can dip into the mid-20s during the heaviest outdoor sections. Neither card was built to run path tracing natively at comfortable frame rates without FSR or XeSS doing heavy lifting – but AMD’s upscaling ecosystem is more mature, and FSR 4 on RDNA 4 hardware produces noticeably cleaner results than XeSS on Battlemage in fast-motion ray traced scenes.
Game-by-Game: Where the B770 Fights Back
The narrative shifts in Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart. Both are well-optimized PC ports with ray traced reflections that are demanding but more efficiently structured than the chaos of Cyberpunk‘s lighting system. In these titles, the B770 closes the gap substantially – sometimes matching the RX 9060 XT within the margin of run-to-run variance. Intel’s driver team has clearly prioritized optimization for titles with predictable ray tracing patterns, and it shows in the benchmark logs.
Control with ray tracing enabled remains a useful stress test because the game’s lighting engine was purpose-built around the feature. Here, the RX 9060 XT pulls ahead again, averaging around 15% better frame times in the most demanding areas of the AWE expansion. The B770 handles Control‘s ray traced shadows better than it handles reflections, which hints at where Battlemage’s ray tracing hardware is actually stronger by design.
Frame pacing is worth addressing directly. The B770 has had a historically inconsistent relationship with frame pacing under ray tracing workloads, and Battlemage improves on Alchemist in this area – but it has not fully closed the gap. During traversal-heavy ray tracing loads, the B770 occasionally produces short stutters that don’t show up in average frame rate numbers but are noticeable during gameplay. The RX 9060 XT’s frame pacing is cleaner across every title tested, which matters more than raw averages when you’re actually playing through a scene rather than watching a benchmark counter.
Upscaling integration deserves its own mention because neither card is meant to run demanding ray tracing natively. With FSR 4 at Quality mode, the RX 9060 XT handles 1080p ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077 well enough to push average frame rates above 60 fps with ray tracing on High – a genuinely usable configuration. The B770 with XeSS at Quality mode gets to a similar place in terms of frame rate, but XeSS’s image quality on Battlemage is inconsistent. Fine detail in motion can look slightly softer than FSR 4’s output, particularly in scenes with lots of small reflected geometry. For a card priced in the mid-range, those visual quality differences matter to the buyer who is specifically choosing between these two options. If you want a comparison of how AMD’s RDNA 4 architecture handles ray tracing at the higher end of the stack, the RX 9060 XT’s rasterization testing covers the broader picture of where the card sits competitively.
Temperature and power draw are not irrelevant when comparing ray tracing performance. Ray tracing workloads push both cards toward their thermal limits faster than standard rasterization, and the B770 runs warmer under sustained ray tracing loads compared to the RX 9060 XT. In a well-ventilated case, neither card is a problem – but in tighter mini-ITX builds, the RX 9060 XT is the more forgiving option under extended ray tracing sessions.
Price, Availability, and the Actual Decision
The RX 9060 XT and Arc B770 are likely to trade blows on street price depending on retailer and region, which is what makes this comparison genuinely difficult to resolve cleanly. If the B770 lands below the RX 9060 XT by a meaningful margin – say, more than $30 – the performance gap in ray tracing becomes harder to justify paying for, especially in titles where the difference is small. At price parity, AMD’s ray tracing hardware advantage and cleaner FSR 4 integration tip the scale.
What this comparison actually reveals is that Intel’s Battlemage is a serious architecture that competes in ray tracing – not just in rasterization where Arc has historically been stronger on paper. The B770 is not losing these comparisons badly; it is losing them specifically, in particular workloads, by margins that matter more to enthusiasts than to someone who mostly plays games that use ray traced shadows rather than full global illumination. The question of which card is worth buying right now probably comes down to whether your game library skews toward the titles where AMD’s advantages are largest – and that list, at 1080p, is shorter than AMD’s marketing would suggest.
