Two GPUs, One Battleground
AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 XT and Nvidia’s RTX 5070 landed within weeks of each other at similar price points, and the rivalry between them has been unusually close. At rasterization, benchmarks across multiple titles show the two cards trading blows within margin-of-error territory. But ray tracing at 1080p is a different story – one where architectural advantages matter far more than raw shader counts, and where AMD still carries the weight of a historical deficit against Nvidia’s dedicated RT hardware.
Testing ray tracing at 1080p specifically might seem counterintuitive. Most people associate the workload with 4K displays and high-end setups. But 1080p ray tracing is where a growing number of mid-range PC gamers actually live – players who want cinematic lighting in titles like Cyberpunk 2077, Alan Wake 2, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle without stepping up to a 4K monitor. These are the users this comparison is built for.
Hardware at a Glance
The RX 9070 XT arrives on AMD’s RDNA 4 architecture, which introduced a significantly overhauled ray tracing engine compared to RDNA 3. AMD doubled the ray accelerators per compute unit and reworked the BVH traversal pipeline to close the gap against Nvidia’s RT cores. On paper, RDNA 4’s RT throughput is roughly twice what RDNA 3 managed – a meaningful generational step that AMD needed to take just to remain competitive in this workload category.
The RTX 5070 runs on Blackwell, Nvidia’s latest architecture, which builds on the already strong RT performance of Ada Lovelace. Blackwell carries third-generation RT cores, and while Nvidia has not published raw RT TFLOP figures in isolation, the architectural lineage is clear. The RTX 5070 sits below the RTX 5070 Ti in Nvidia’s stack, meaning it gives up some compute headroom compared to its bigger sibling – which matters in heavily RT-loaded scenes where sustained throughput becomes the limiting factor rather than memory bandwidth.
Both cards launch around the $550 range at MSRP, though actual street pricing has fluctuated. The RX 9070 XT carries 16GB of GDDR6 memory versus the RTX 5070’s 12GB of GDDR7. At 1080p, VRAM rarely becomes a constraint for ray tracing workloads in isolation, but the gap becomes relevant when texture quality settings are pushed alongside RT effects.
What the Tests Actually Show
Across a representative set of ray tracing titles at 1080p with Ultra or High RT settings enabled and no upscaling applied, the RTX 5070 holds a consistent lead. In Cyberpunk 2077 with Ray Tracing: Ultra mode active, the RTX 5070 delivers roughly 15 to 20 percent higher average frame rates than the RX 9070 XT. The gap narrows slightly in titles with lighter RT implementations – games using selective RT shadows or ambient occlusion rather than full path tracing – but the RTX 5070 rarely falls behind.
The most demanding test is Alan Wake 2 with its full ray tracing pipeline. Here the gap widens. The RX 9070 XT can run the game at 1080p High RT settings at playable frame rates, but the RTX 5070 pulls significantly ahead, particularly in outdoor scenes with complex lighting interactions across multiple surfaces. AMD’s improvements in RDNA 4 are real and measurable against what RDNA 3 produced, but Nvidia’s dedicated RT hardware pipeline still processes ray-geometry intersection queries faster at equivalent clock speeds.
Frame Generation Changes the Math
Neither card’s raw RT performance tells the complete story because both support frame generation technology. Nvidia’s Multi Frame Generation, introduced with Blackwell, can generate multiple synthetic frames per rendered frame – which at 1080p specifically produces very high output frame rates even in demanding RT scenarios. AMD’s Fluid Motion Frames 2 also works at this resolution, but Nvidia’s implementation generates more frames per cycle, which means the practical performance gap between the two cards widens further when frame generation is active.
The counter-argument for the RX 9070 XT is FSR 4, which AMD launched alongside RDNA 4. At 1080p, FSR 4’s machine-learning upscaler runs natively on the RX 9070 XT’s hardware, and image quality is visibly better than FSR 3. Pairing FSR 4 with Fluid Motion Frames 2 gives RX 9070 XT owners a viable path to high frame rates in RT-heavy games. Whether the output quality matches DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation remains subjective – but the gap between the two upscaling ecosystems has closed compared to a year ago. For a full look at how the 9070 XT compares against Nvidia’s higher tier in ray tracing, the Radeon RX 9070 XT vs RTX 5070 Ti 4K ray tracing comparison covers what happens when resolution and RT complexity both increase simultaneously.
At 1080p specifically, frame generation carries some inherent risk. Input latency is a genuine concern when output frame rates look high but rendered frame rates are lower. At this resolution, base rendered frame rates on both cards are high enough that Nvidia Reflex and AMD’s equivalent latency reduction tools can compensate. But users running RT-heavy modes at the absolute limits of what the hardware can render natively should watch frame timing data, not just average fps numbers.
The RX 9070 XT is not a bad ray tracing card. Compared to anything AMD shipped before RDNA 4, it is a substantial improvement, and in lighter RT workloads at 1080p it performs well enough that the gap against the RTX 5070 becomes less of a decisive factor. For players who primarily use RT for ambient occlusion and shadow quality rather than full path tracing, the RX 9070 XT’s 16GB GDDR6 buffer and lower typical retail pricing make it a reasonable choice – especially given that AMD’s driver support has stabilized significantly since launch.
The RTX 5070 wins this specific comparison clearly, but the interesting question is whether that RT lead justifies the price difference that has opened between these two cards in practice. The RX 9070 XT has been available at street pricing below MSRP in some markets, while RTX 5070 supply constraints have pushed that card’s street price above the $550 launch figure in many regions. At identical prices, the RTX 5070’s RT advantage makes the decision straightforward. At a meaningful price gap, the math gets harder – and AMD is counting on exactly that friction.
