Ray Tracing at 1080p: Where AMD and Nvidia Actually Stand
Ray tracing has been Nvidia’s home turf since the RTX 20 series launched it into mainstream conversation back in 2018. The RTX Cores, the denoising algorithms, the tightly integrated DLSS pipeline – Nvidia built a multi-year head start that AMD has been chasing ever since. With the Radeon RX 9070 now on shelves and going directly after the RTX 5070 at a similar price point, the question is no longer whether AMD can compete on rasterization. The real test is whether RDNA 4 can finally close the ray tracing gap.
At 1080p specifically, ray tracing performance is an interesting stress test. The resolution is low enough that GPU compute headroom should allow both cards to push high frame rates even with ray tracing enabled – but that same headroom also exposes architectural differences more clearly than 4K, where raw memory bandwidth tends to flatten the field.
These two cards are priced close enough to each other that the ray tracing result could genuinely decide which one is worth buying.
The Architecture Behind the Numbers
Nvidia’s RTX 5070 is built on Blackwell, the same architecture powering the flagship RTX 5090. It carries dedicated hardware ray tracing units that have now gone through four generations of refinement, and the integration with DLSS 4 – including Multi Frame Generation – gives it a software pipeline that no AMD card currently matches on the performance scaling side. The RTX 5070 ships with 12GB of GDDR7 memory and 48MB of L2 cache, which helps significantly when ray tracing workloads start throwing large BVH traversal datasets at the GPU.
AMD’s RDNA 4 architecture, powering the RX 9070, represents the most substantial ray tracing redesign AMD has done to date. The RX 9070 doubles its ray accelerator count compared to RDNA 3, and AMD has reworked how the hardware handles BVH traversal and intersection testing. On paper, that should translate to a meaningful generational improvement. The card ships with 16GB of GDDR6 memory, which gives it a raw capacity edge, though GDDR6 does trail GDDR7 in bandwidth.
What matters in practice is how those architectural decisions play out in actual game workloads, not theoretical compute specs. Ray tracing is notoriously dependent on scene complexity, the number of light bounces a game requests, and how well the game’s implementation is optimized for a given vendor’s hardware. Nvidia-sponsored titles have historically leaned on features like DLSS Ray Reconstruction, which is not available on AMD hardware at all.
Game-by-Game Performance at 1080p
In Cyberpunk 2077 with Path Tracing enabled, the RTX 5070 holds a substantial lead. This is expected territory – CD Projekt Red’s implementation is deeply tied to Nvidia’s ray tracing pipeline, and the RTX 5070 can sustain playable frame rates at 1080p with Path Tracing that the RX 9070 simply cannot match without leaning heavily on FSR upscaling. With DLSS Quality mode, the RTX 5070 runs Cyberpunk‘s Path Tracing mode comfortably above 60fps in most areas of Night City. The RX 9070 with FSR 4 Quality gets closer than its predecessor would have, but it still trails by a noticeable margin in this specific workload.
Alan Wake 2 tells a more competitive story. Remedy’s implementation supports both Nvidia and AMD hardware more evenly, and at 1080p with ray tracing set to high – not the full path tracing preset – the RX 9070 closes the gap considerably. The RTX 5070 still leads, but the difference drops to a range where most players would not notice it without a frame counter on screen. In Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, both of which have solid ray tracing implementations on PC, the gap narrows further. AMD has clearly put serious engineering work into RDNA 4’s RT throughput, and in games that are not actively built around Nvidia-specific features, the RX 9070 performs as a genuine competitor.
Where the RTX 5070 consistently pulls ahead regardless of title is in any game using DLSS Ray Reconstruction or Nvidia’s Reflex-heavy competitive pipeline. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, for instance, benefits significantly from Ray Reconstruction, and that feature is locked to RTX hardware. AMD’s answer to this is FSR 4, which is improving rapidly but does not yet offer a direct equivalent to Ray Reconstruction’s denoising quality. That gap matters in titles where denoising artifacts are visible at native or near-native resolution.
The Verdict on Ray Tracing at 1080p
The RTX 5070 wins the ray tracing benchmark at 1080p – but the margin depends almost entirely on which games you play. In Nvidia-optimized titles, particularly those using Path Tracing or Ray Reconstruction, the gap is wide enough to matter. In games with vendor-neutral implementations, the RX 9070 has genuinely earned a seat at the table. AMD’s ray tracing story in RDNA 4 is not a complete solution yet, but it is no longer an embarrassment either. If your library is heavy on Nvidia-sponsored titles with aggressive RT features, the RTX 5070 is the easier recommendation. If you split your time across a broader range of games and already know the RX 9070 wins on rasterization – which it does at 1080p, as covered in our rasterization comparison – the real question becomes whether Nvidia’s ray tracing advantage is worth paying a premium for.
For most players buying at the $500-550 price range and gaming at 1080p, ray tracing will not be the only deciding factor – but it is the one area where Nvidia still has a structural advantage that AMD’s hardware alone cannot fully close, regardless of how good FSR 4 gets.
