Two Cards, One Target: AMD vs Nvidia at 1440p
AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 and Nvidia’s RTX 5070 are priced close enough to each other that the choice between them should come down to actual performance – not brand loyalty or marketing copy. Both cards target the sweet spot of 1440p gaming, and both carry hardware-accelerated ray tracing support. The question is whether AMD has finally closed the gap that has made ray tracing a sore subject for Radeon users for the past several generations.
Ray tracing has historically been Nvidia’s home turf. The RTX architecture, purpose-built with dedicated RT cores, has consistently outrun AMD’s competing solutions when shaders start calculating light bounces, shadows, and reflections. But AMD’s RDNA 4 architecture – the foundation of the RX 9070 – brings a substantially redesigned ray accelerator setup that AMD claims delivers far more RT performance than RDNA 3 ever could.
The raw specs set the stage clearly: the RX 9070 ships with 16GB of GDDR6 memory, 32 compute units under the Navi 48 die, and runs at a 256-bit memory bus. The RTX 5070, built on Nvidia’s Blackwell architecture, counters with 12GB of GDDR7, 48 Streaming Multiprocessors, and its fifth-generation RT cores.
Ray Tracing Benchmarks: What the Numbers Actually Show
In Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p with ray tracing set to High and path tracing disabled, the RTX 5070 holds a meaningful lead – averaging around 20 to 25 percent higher frame rates when relying purely on native rendering. Enable DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation on the Nvidia side, and that gap widens considerably, because AMD’s FSR 4 upscaling, while a genuine step forward from FSR 3, does not yet match the visual stability of DLSS 4 at equivalent quality settings. That said, with FSR 4 Quality mode active on the RX 9070, frame rates in Cyberpunk become competitive enough that the raw RT performance deficit is partially masked during normal gameplay pacing.
Alan Wake 2 tells a more nuanced story. With Path Tracing enabled at 1440p, the RTX 5070 again leads, but the RX 9070 holds up better here relative to expectations. AMD’s RDNA 4 ray accelerators handle the workload with noticeably less frame rate collapse compared to RDNA 3 GPUs tested in the same scene. At medium path tracing settings without upscaling, the RX 9070 drops to frame rates that are playable but choppy in demanding sequences – around the mid-40s in the heaviest sections. The RTX 5070 stays north of 60fps in those same areas.
Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Returnal – both with full RT enabled – tighten the gap noticeably. In these titles, the RX 9070 trades blows far more confidently, sometimes landing within 10 percent of the RTX 5070’s output. These are games where RT effects are significant but not total-scene path traced workloads, which suggests the RX 9070 is strong at mid-complexity ray tracing but struggles specifically when full path tracing hammers every light calculation simultaneously.
Rasterization, Value, and the Upscaling Factor
Strip ray tracing out of the equation entirely and the RX 9070 becomes a genuinely attractive option. In standard rasterization workloads at 1440p across titles like Black Myth: Wukong, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Hogwarts Legacy, the RX 9070 performs within a few percentage points of the RTX 5070 – sometimes matching it outright. AMD’s RDNA 4 architecture made major rasterization efficiency gains, and they are visible in these results.
Pricing is where AMD makes its strongest argument. The RX 9070 launched at a lower MSRP than the RTX 5070, and in real-world retail availability, the gap has been noticeable. If you are building a 1440p gaming rig and ray tracing is not your primary concern, the RX 9070 delivers more raw rasterization value per dollar. Nvidia’s edge in RT performance comes at a price premium, and that premium only makes sense if you regularly play titles that lean heavily into path tracing or RT effects. For those who do – particularly players deep into Cyberpunk 2077 with path tracing active – the RTX 5070 is the cleaner choice.
The upscaling conversation cannot be ignored. Nvidia’s DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation is the strongest consumer upscaling solution available right now, and it meaningfully props up the RTX 5070’s effective frame rate ceiling at 1440p with RT enabled. AMD’s FSR 4 is genuinely better than its predecessors and works across a wider range of hardware – including non-AMD GPUs – but it does not generate frames with the same ghost-free stability in fast motion sequences. For the RX 9070, that means the practical experience in heavily ray-traced scenes can feel rougher than the average frame rate number suggests, particularly in high-velocity action.
The Verdict
If you play a broad library of games where ray tracing is one feature among many – not the entire rendering pipeline – the RX 9070 makes a strong case for itself at 1440p, and AMD fans who want to see how the company’s hardware performs in the broader mid-range battle should also check out the Radeon RX 9060 XT vs RTX 5060 Ti 1440p ray tracing comparison for context lower down the stack. But if you specifically bought into the current generation to experience full path tracing in titles built around it, the RTX 5070 is still the card that lets you do that without constantly watching the frame counter drop.
