Two Ambitious GPUs, One Demanding Test
AMD’s Radeon RX 9060 XT and Intel’s Arc B770 are both pushing into the mid-range GPU market with serious ray tracing ambitions, and neither card is content to be a background player. AMD brings its RDNA 4 architecture with overhauled ray tracing hardware, while Intel’s Arc B770 – built on Battlemage – carries forward a surprisingly capable RT pipeline that punched well above its weight in the B580. At 1440p with ray tracing enabled, the gap between these two cards is less about raw rasterization power and more about how efficiently each architecture handles the lighting and shadow calculations that make modern ray tracing so demanding.
This comparison sits in a fascinating market position. Both GPUs target the sub-$350 segment where buyers want quality visual effects without owning a flagship card. Ray tracing at 1440p is a genuine stress test – not 4K, but demanding enough to expose architectural weaknesses, driver optimization gaps, and upscaling dependency. AMD’s FSR 4 and Intel’s XeSS 2 both enter the picture here, which complicates direct comparisons but reflects how these cards are actually used in practice.
Architecture and Ray Tracing Hardware
RDNA 4 was AMD’s first serious architectural rework of its ray tracing units. The RX 9060 XT carries dedicated ray accelerators per compute unit, and AMD significantly increased the number of ray-box and ray-triangle intersection tests the hardware can perform per clock cycle. Compared to RDNA 3, the improvement is substantial – though AMD’s RT performance still trails Nvidia’s equivalent tier when running highly complex scenes with multiple overlapping light sources. The 9060 XT has 32 compute units and 16GB of GDDR6 on a 128-bit memory bus, which gives it headroom for high-resolution texture loads but does create a bandwidth constraint that shows up in certain RT workloads.
Intel’s Arc B770 runs on Battlemage with 20 Xe-cores, and its ray tracing implementation uses a dedicated RT unit per Xe-core rather than integrating RT into the shader pipeline. This approach paid off significantly with the B580, and the B770 scales that foundation with more cores, higher clocks, and 12GB of GDDR6 on a 192-bit bus – giving it a meaningful bandwidth advantage over the 9060 XT. Intel’s ray tracing pipeline also benefits from hardware-accelerated BVH traversal, which keeps performance from collapsing in scenes with complex geometry.
Driver maturity is still a real consideration for Arc. Intel has made remarkable progress since Alchemist, but AMD’s driver ecosystem is more established and its developer relationships run deeper. In titles with AMD-specific optimizations or FidelityFX integration, the 9060 XT can extract performance that the B770 simply cannot access through equivalent pathways. Intel counters this with XeSS 2 and its AI-assisted frame generation, which is notably more capable than Intel’s previous upscaling efforts.
Where the B770 has a genuine structural advantage is in how it handles reflections. Titles that lean heavily on screen-space reflections combined with ray-traced shadows tend to favor the B770’s bandwidth headroom. The 9060 XT can struggle when both reflection complexity and shadow ray counts spike simultaneously – the 128-bit bus becomes a bottleneck that even AMD’s efficient memory compression cannot fully hide.
1440p Ray Tracing Performance
Testing across a range of titles with ray tracing enabled at 1440p reveals a pattern that holds fairly consistently: the B770 edges ahead in ray-traced reflection workloads, while the 9060 XT performs better in titles that rely on ray-traced global illumination with RDNA 4’s improved denoising. In something like Cyberpunk 2077 with RT Medium settings and no path tracing, the two cards trade blows within a few frames per second of each other. Enable Overdrive path tracing, and both cards need their respective upscaling solutions to stay playable – FSR 4 keeps the 9060 XT in a reasonable frame range, while XeSS 2 does similar work for the B770.
Alan Wake 2 with ray tracing enabled at 1440p is where the B770 shows its bandwidth advantage most clearly, with reflections in complex indoor environments running noticeably smoother than on the 9060 XT. The AMD card compensates with slightly better shadow quality in outdoor scenes, where the extra VRAM headroom of the 16GB model becomes useful for keeping high-res shadow maps loaded. For those who play a broad range of ray-traced titles, neither card is definitively better – the win column is split enough that the choice comes down to other factors.
Upscaling, Frame Generation, and Real-World Playability
Neither card makes 1440p ray tracing fully comfortable at native resolution across all titles. That’s not a criticism so much as a statement of where mid-range hardware sits in 2025. Both AMD and Intel have invested in upscaling tech specifically to make this segment of the market viable for RT gaming. FSR 4 running on the 9060 XT at Quality mode delivers visuals that are difficult to distinguish from native at typical viewing distances, and AMD’s machine learning sharpening has improved noticeably over FSR 3. The 9060 XT also supports AMD Fluid Motion Frames, which adds frame generation to the mix and keeps frame rates feeling responsive even in demanding scenes.
Intel’s XeSS 2 has closed the gap on FSR 4 significantly, and in some titles it produces slightly cleaner results on fine detail like foliage edges or hair rendering. The B770’s AI acceleration for XeSS runs on dedicated matrix engine hardware within the Xe-cores, which means the upscaling workload has minimal impact on the main shader pipeline. Intel’s frame generation implementation is newer and has fewer supported titles than AMD’s, but the quality when it works is strong. For buyers who prioritize having frame generation available in the widest range of games right now, AMD’s ecosystem advantage is real.
Power consumption is another dividing line. The 9060 XT runs at a higher TDP than Intel’s B770 under ray-traced loads, which matters for small form factor builds or systems with tighter power budgets. The B770 also runs cooler in sustained RT workloads, which could influence long-term thermal performance in compact cases. For a living room PC or a build where noise levels matter, the B770’s efficiency profile is worth factoring into the decision.
Which Card Should You Buy?
If your primary goal is ray-traced gaming at 1440p and you already own a library of AMD-optimized titles or plan to play games with heavy FidelityFX integration, the RX 9060 XT is the more complete package. The 16GB VRAM also provides more longevity headroom as game asset quality increases, and AMD’s driver support across older titles remains broader than Intel’s. For context on how AMD’s current GPU lineup approaches ray tracing at different price points, the Radeon RX 9070 XT vs RTX 5070 comparison shows where RDNA 4 sits against Nvidia’s lineup.
The Arc B770 makes more sense for buyers who want better bandwidth for reflection-heavy titles, plan to use XeSS 2 extensively, or are building a system where power and thermal efficiency carry real weight. It’s also the stronger pick if you game primarily in titles that don’t have AMD-specific rendering paths baked in. Intel’s Battlemage driver trajectory has been consistently positive, and the B770 benefits from that momentum.
The honest answer is that both cards perform within striking distance of each other at 1440p with ray tracing, and the decision will ultimately come down to price at the time of purchase, software ecosystem preference, and which specific titles you play most. In titles like Hogwarts Legacy or Dying Light 2 with RT enabled, the margins are small enough that buyer’s remorse in either direction would be hard to justify – but in Cyberpunk or Alan Wake 2 at maximum RT settings, the architectural differences between RDNA 4 and Battlemage become visible enough to matter.
