AMD vs Nvidia at 1080p Ray Tracing: A Real Fight This Time
Ray tracing has long been Nvidia’s home turf. Since the RTX 20 series launched the feature in 2018, AMD cards have technically supported it while quietly losing every benchmark that mattered. The RTX 5070 arrives carrying that legacy – Nvidia’s architecture, driver maturity, and DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation all stacked in its favor. The Radeon RX 9070, built on AMD’s RDNA 4 architecture, is the first AMD card in years that actually challenges the narrative rather than just showing up.
This test focuses exclusively on 1080p ray tracing performance – no rasterization numbers, no upscaling comparisons, just native or near-native ray tracing across a set of titles that stress the feature in meaningfully different ways. The RTX 5070 carries an MSRP of around $549, while the RX 9070 sits at $549 as well on paper, though real-world availability has made both cards harder to find at those prices. The price parity makes the comparison straightforward: if AMD can match or approach Nvidia’s ray tracing output at the same cost, that is a real story.
It mostly can. But the gap is not zero, and where it opens up tells you everything about how these two architectures handle light differently.
The Architecture Behind the Numbers
Nvidia’s RTX 5070 uses the Blackwell architecture, with second-generation RT cores that handle Bounding Volume Hierarchy traversal in dedicated hardware. That matters for ray tracing specifically because BVH traversal is the computational bottleneck in most ray traced scenes – it determines how efficiently the GPU can calculate which rays hit which surfaces. Blackwell improves on Ada Lovelace’s already strong RT performance, and the RTX 5070 inherits those gains fully.
AMD’s RDNA 4, by contrast, is the first AMD architecture that treats ray tracing as a primary workload rather than a checkbox feature. The RX 9070 includes upgraded Ray Accelerators compared to RDNA 3, and AMD has publicly stated that improving ray tracing throughput was a core engineering priority for this generation. The results in testing back that up – RDNA 4’s RT performance per compute unit is meaningfully better than what the RX 7900 XTX achieved, which itself was not competitive with even Ada’s mid-range cards.
Where Nvidia still holds structural advantages is in software. DLSS 4’s transformer model is genuinely better at reconstruction than FSR 4, and Frame Generation on the RTX side is more mature with broader game support. At native 1080p ray tracing, though, upscaling and frame generation are not in the equation – it comes down to raw hardware capability, and that is where AMD has closed the gap most dramatically.
Game-by-Game Ray Tracing Results
In Cyberpunk 2077 with Overdrive mode enabled – the full path tracing implementation that uses RT for every light interaction in the scene – the RTX 5070 leads the RX 9070 by roughly 25 to 30 percent at 1080p native. That is a real gap. Overdrive is among the most demanding ray tracing workloads available in any shipping game, and Nvidia’s RT hardware handles the ray budget more efficiently. Both cards are playable in this mode at 1080p with some quality adjustments, but the RTX 5070 has noticeably more headroom.
Alan Wake 2 with full ray tracing enabled tells a more balanced story. The RX 9070 closes to within 10 to 15 percent of the RTX 5070 across most scenes, with the gap narrowing further in interior and forest sections where the ray complexity favors AMD’s architecture slightly. Control with maximum RT settings shows near-parity between the two cards – the RX 9070 trailing by single-digit percentages in most runs, occasionally trading positions depending on scene composition. Dying Light 2 with global illumination enabled falls in a similar range, with the Radeon card within striking distance throughout.
The pattern across all tested titles is consistent: the larger and more complex the ray tracing workload, the wider Nvidia’s lead. In path tracing scenarios that essentially replace the entire rendering pipeline with ray-traced light, the RTX 5070 pulls away clearly. In hybrid implementations that use ray tracing selectively for shadows, reflections, or ambient occlusion, AMD’s gains in RDNA 4 bring the RX 9070 to near-competitive territory. For most games shipping today, which use hybrid RT rather than full path tracing, the performance difference is smaller than any previous AMD vs Nvidia ray tracing comparison at similar price points.
What This Means for Buyers at 1080p
If you are gaming at 1080p and ray tracing is a priority, the RTX 5070 remains the stronger card – that is the honest answer. The lead is real, particularly in titles pushing path tracing or heavy RT implementations. But AMD has narrowed the gap enough with RDNA 4 that the RX 9070 is no longer an automatic disqualification for players who care about RT effects. For the hybrid ray tracing that most games actually ship with, the performance difference at 1080p is often small enough to land within the margin of driver updates, background process variation, or even a firmware revision. The conversation about AMD and ray tracing has genuinely changed this generation – which is not something that could have been written honestly about RDNA 3.
What remains unresolved is whether AMD’s driver team can sustain optimization momentum as more RT-heavy titles ship. Nvidia has six years of RT driver work behind it. AMD is starting from a better hardware position than ever before, but hardware alone does not win that race.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the RX 9070 good for ray tracing at 1080p?
Yes, the RX 9070 performs competitively in hybrid ray tracing at 1080p, though the RTX 5070 still leads in full path tracing workloads like Cyberpunk 2077 Overdrive mode.
How much faster is the RTX 5070 than the RX 9070 in ray tracing?
The gap ranges from near-parity in light hybrid RT implementations to around 25-30 percent in heavy path tracing scenarios, depending on the game.
