Radeon RX 9070 Ray Tracing Tested Against RTX 5070

AMD vs Nvidia on Ray Tracing: The Gap Is Closing, But Not Gone

AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 arrived with serious ambitions. Built on the RDNA 4 architecture, it brought hardware-accelerated ray tracing improvements that AMD openly acknowledged were long overdue. For years, Nvidia held an embarrassing lead in ray tracing performance, and AMD’s previous RDNA 3 cards often fell apart in titles that pushed ray tracing hard. RDNA 4 changes the equation – but by how much?

The RTX 5070, Nvidia’s mid-to-high-range Blackwell card, sits in a similar price category and carries the full weight of Nvidia’s latest ray tracing hardware, including fourth-generation RT cores and DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation. Putting these two cards head-to-head in ray tracing workloads tells you a lot about where AMD stands in 2025 – and where it still needs to catch up.

Test Setup and Methodology

Testing was conducted across five ray tracing-heavy titles: Cyberpunk 2077 with Path Tracing enabled, Alan Wake 2 with full ray tracing, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Black Myth: Wukong with RT reflections and shadows active, and Control with all RT effects on. Resolution tested was 1440p native, with upscaling separately evaluated. Both cards were tested on the same system: AMD Ryzen 9 9900X, 32GB DDR5-6000, running Windows 11 with the latest available drivers for each GPU.

The RX 9070 ran on AMD Adrenalin 25.x drivers, while the RTX 5070 used Nvidia’s 576.xx driver package. Both cards were tested without upscaling first to establish pure rasterization-versus-ray-tracing baselines, then tested again with FSR 4 on the AMD side and DLSS 4 Quality mode on the Nvidia side. Path Tracing in Cyberpunk 2077 was tested separately given its extreme hardware demands.

Neither card was overclocked. Power limits were left at stock settings. This gives a realistic picture of out-of-the-box performance for buyers who just plug in a card and play, which is how the vast majority of people will actually use these GPUs.

Native Ray Tracing Performance

Without upscaling, the RTX 5070 leads across every tested title – but the margins are narrower than anyone expected from AMD hardware. In Alan Wake 2 with full ray tracing at 1440p, the RTX 5070 averaged around 58 fps compared to the RX 9070’s 49 fps. That is a real gap, roughly 18 percent in Nvidia’s favor, but AMD’s number is actually playable in a way that RDNA 3 results simply were not in the same scenario.

In Black Myth: Wukong with RT enabled, the gap tightened further. The RTX 5070 pulled about 72 fps, the RX 9070 around 64 fps. Both cards handled the workload comfortably, and the difference is unlikely to be noticeable in day-to-day play. Control told a similar story – the RX 9070 ran smoothly with RT on where RDNA 3 cards often stuttered or dropped to unacceptable frame rates.

Path Tracing in Cyberpunk 2077 is where the divide becomes harder to ignore. The RTX 5070 averaged around 38 fps at 1440p native with Path Tracing at max settings. The RX 9070 dropped to roughly 24 fps in the same scene. That is a steep 37 percent deficit, and it reflects the fundamental hardware advantage Nvidia still holds when ray tracing workloads become truly extreme. RDNA 4’s RT cores are faster than their predecessors, but Nvidia’s Blackwell RT hardware processes ray-triangle intersections at a different level when scenes become geometrically dense.

Path Tracing, in its current form, is still largely an Nvidia showcase. AMD’s hardware can handle moderate ray tracing convincingly, but the ceiling on what RDNA 4 can do before frame rates collapse is lower. This matters for buyers who care about playing Cyberpunk 2077 the way CD Projekt Red now recommends – with Path Tracing on and upscaling handling the performance recovery.

Upscaling Changes the Practical Picture

Once upscaling enters the equation, the story shifts. FSR 4 – AMD’s latest machine-learning upscaling – is a substantial improvement over FSR 3.1, and it closes the visual quality gap with DLSS 4 Quality mode meaningfully. In Alan Wake 2, enabling FSR 4 Quality on the RX 9070 pushed frame rates to 74 fps. DLSS 4 Quality on the RTX 5070 reached 89 fps. Both are well above 60, both look clean at 1440p output, and for most players the practical experience is comparable.

Where Nvidia’s advantage becomes concrete again is Multi Frame Generation. DLSS 4 MFG can generate up to three additional frames per rendered frame, which means the RTX 5070’s 38 fps Path Tracing baseline in Cyberpunk 2077 becomes a reported 90-plus fps output. The RX 9070 with FSR 4 and Frame Generation active hits around 58 fps in the same scenario – better, but not in the same league. AMD has Frame Generation through FSR 3, but does not yet have a multi-frame equivalent that competes directly with MFG in terms of multiplier effect.

Where the RX 9070 Actually Wins

The RX 9070 does not beat the RTX 5070 in ray tracing. That needs to be said directly. But it competes in a way AMD’s previous generation could not, and the value angle is real. The RX 9070 launched at $549, the RTX 5070 at $549 as well – on paper the same price. In practice, the RTX 5070 has been harder to find at MSRP, and street prices have regularly pushed it above $650. The RX 9070 has stayed closer to its launch price in most regions.

For rasterization performance, the two cards trade blows much more evenly, and in some non-RT titles the RX 9070 actually edges ahead. That means ray tracing is not the only axis on which buyers should evaluate these cards. If you spend 80 percent of your time in games that use light RT effects – reflections, ambient occlusion, contact shadows – the RX 9070 handles those without issue.

The honest read on RDNA 4 ray tracing is that it went from a clear weakness to a competitive-but-not-leading capability. AMD has fixed the embarrassment. The architecture now handles the moderate RT workloads that most published games actually use. What it has not done is match Nvidia at the extreme end, where Path Tracing and geometry-heavy scenes reveal that Nvidia’s dedicated RT hardware still processes those workloads faster at the silicon level.

For buyers who want the best possible ray tracing performance at this price point and can find an RTX 5070 at MSRP, Nvidia is still the answer. For buyers who want strong all-around performance, competitive ray tracing in most real-world games, and an easier time actually buying the card at its listed price – the RX 9070 makes a genuine case. The more interesting question is what happens when AMD’s next mid-range RDNA 4 card arrives and whether FSR 4’s continued development addresses the remaining gap in Path Tracing scenarios where the RX 9070 currently runs out of headroom.