AMD vs. Nvidia at 4K with Ray Tracing: A Real Test
The Radeon RX 9070 and the RTX 5070 sit in the same price bracket, target the same buyers, and both promise solid 4K gaming. But ray tracing has historically been Nvidia’s stronghold, and AMD’s RDNA 4 architecture is the most aggressive challenge the company has mounted to that advantage yet. So what actually happens when you push both cards through demanding ray-traced workloads at 4K?
The Setup and What We’re Testing
Both cards were tested on the same platform – a high-end desktop with a current-generation processor and 32GB of DDR5 memory – to isolate GPU performance as cleanly as possible. Ray tracing was tested across a range of titles with different RT implementations: some lean on reflections, others on global illumination, and a few use full path tracing. That variety matters because no single game tells the whole story, and cherry-picking one benchmark is exactly the kind of thing that makes GPU comparisons unreliable.
The RTX 5070 carries an MSRP of around $549, while the RX 9070 launched at $549 as well, making this one of the cleaner apples-to-apples matchups the GPU market has offered in years. Nvidia’s card uses Blackwell architecture with dedicated fourth-generation RT cores and DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation. AMD counters with RDNA 4, which doubled the ray accelerators per compute unit compared to RDNA 3, plus FSR 4 with its machine learning upscaling and frame generation. The theoretical gap in ray tracing hardware has narrowed considerably on paper – the question is whether that translates to actual game performance.
At native 4K without upscaling, the RTX 5070 still leads in most ray-traced titles. In Cyberpunk 2077 with RT Overdrive (path tracing) enabled, the RTX 5070 holds a meaningful advantage – averaging roughly 15 to 20 frames per second higher than the RX 9070 at native resolution. That is not a small gap. Path tracing is an extreme case, but it is also where the market is moving as developers grow more comfortable with it as a baseline lighting solution rather than a showcase feature.
In games with lighter RT loads – reflections and shadows in titles like Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered or Alan Wake 2 at medium RT settings – the gap narrows to single digits. In some cases the two cards trade blows depending on the scene. AMD has clearly closed ground, but “closing ground” and “pulling ahead” are different things, and at 4K with ray tracing maxed, Nvidia still has the lead in raw rasterized RT output.
Where Upscaling Changes Everything
Native resolution numbers only tell part of the story in 2025. Both cards have mature upscaling solutions that the overwhelming majority of players will actually use, and that shifts the comparison considerably. DLSS 4 with the new transformer-based model running at Quality mode is genuinely difficult to distinguish from native 4K in most titles. FSR 4 represents AMD’s biggest quality jump yet and is no longer clearly behind in head-to-head image quality comparisons – though Nvidia still has a slight edge in motion clarity in fast-moving scenes.
The bigger differentiator is frame generation. Nvidia’s Multi Frame Generation generates up to three additional frames per rendered frame, which sounds absurd but in practice allows the RTX 5070 to post frame rates in Cyberpunk RT Overdrive that the RX 9070 simply cannot match even with AMD’s own frame generation enabled. In Alan Wake 2 at 4K with full ray tracing and frame generation active, the RTX 5070 averaged well over 100 fps while the RX 9070 sat in the high 70s to low 80s. For players targeting 60 fps, neither card struggles – but for players chasing high frame rates on a 120Hz or 144Hz display with demanding RT settings, the Nvidia card has a real advantage that becomes hard to ignore.
AMD’s frame generation works well and is less restrictive than Nvidia’s in terms of compatible titles, since it operates at the driver level rather than requiring per-game integration. But it generates one additional frame per rendered frame, not three. The multiplier difference is significant when you are starting from a lower native frame rate under ray tracing loads. This is not a software problem AMD can easily patch – it is an architectural and algorithmic challenge that takes time to narrow.
There is one area where AMD’s approach genuinely helps: VRAM. The RX 9070 ships with 16GB of GDDR6 compared to the RTX 5070’s 12GB. At 4K with ray tracing enabled and high-resolution texture packs loaded, some titles will push past 12GB of VRAM usage. This is not a consistent problem with the RTX 5070 today, but it is a concern worth flagging for longevity. A GPU bought today will be in use for three to five years, and texture budgets only grow.
Rasterization performance – meaning traditional non-ray-traced rendering – is actually close enough between these two cards that game choice matters more than GPU choice in that scenario. AMD wins some titles, Nvidia wins others, and the margins are rarely dramatic. The RX 9070 is not a slow card by any measure. The gap exists specifically in ray tracing, and within ray tracing, it is most pronounced when path tracing or heavy full-scene RT is enabled rather than lighter hybrid implementations. The step-up tier tells a similar story, with AMD’s XT variant competing hard against Nvidia’s higher-end option across the same test suite.
Who Should Buy Which Card
If ray tracing performance is the primary reason you are upgrading, and you play in titles that use heavy RT or path tracing, the RTX 5070 is the better card at this price point. The lead is consistent enough across enough titles that it is not a fluke of benchmark selection. DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation extends that lead further for players on high-refresh displays. Nvidia has built a genuine technical moat around ray tracing that RDNA 4, for all its improvements, has not fully erased.
The RX 9070 makes the most sense for buyers who play primarily in rasterized titles, who want extra VRAM headroom, or who have philosophical or practical reasons to prefer AMD drivers and software. It is also a better pick if you game on Linux, where AMD’s open-source driver stack remains more consistent than Nvidia’s. At the same price, neither card is a bad choice – but they are not the same choice, and anyone walking into a store today thinking ray tracing performance is equivalent between them will be disappointed once RT Overdrive loads up.
