The Mid-Range Ray Tracing Battle That Actually Matters
Ray tracing at 1080p sounds like a strange benchmark to run in 2025 – most players targeting this resolution are doing so because they want high frame rates, not cinematic lighting effects. But the Radeon RX 9070 XT and the RTX 5070 Ti are cards that appeal to a specific kind of PC gamer: someone who wants every visual setting maxed out at a competitive price, and who plays on a 1080p monitor that can push 144Hz or higher. For that player, ray tracing performance at this resolution is exactly where the purchasing decision gets complicated.
AMD’s RX 9070 XT launched at $599, undercutting the RTX 5070 Ti’s $749 MSRP by a significant margin. On paper, that price gap should be the end of the conversation. In rasterization workloads, the two cards trade blows often enough that AMD’s pricing looks like an obvious win. But ray tracing has historically been NVIDIA’s home turf, and the RTX 5070 Ti carries the fifth-generation RT cores and DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation – tools that can artificially widen the performance gap in ways that straight benchmark numbers don’t always capture cleanly.
The gap between these two cards tells a more complicated story than either company’s marketing would suggest.
Cyberpunk 2077 and Alan Wake 2: AMD’s Toughest Tests
Cyberpunk 2077 with path tracing enabled remains the most demanding ray tracing workload available on PC, and it is where the RTX 5070 Ti pulls its largest lead over the RX 9070 XT at 1080p. Running the game at maximum ray tracing settings without any upscaling, the RTX 5070 Ti averages in the 55-65 fps range – playable, but not smooth. The RX 9070 XT drops below 40 fps in the same scenario. That is not a narrow gap. AMD’s RDNA 4 architecture made significant improvements to ray tracing throughput over RDNA 3, but Cyberpunk’s path tracing implementation is so NVIDIA-optimized that the architectural headstart barely closes the distance.
Alan Wake 2 tells a similar story. The game uses a hardware ray tracing pipeline for its global illumination, and without upscaling engaged, the RTX 5070 Ti maintains a comfortable 70-80 fps average at 1080p with full ray tracing on. The RX 9070 XT lands closer to 50-60 fps – usable, and genuinely impressive given the price point, but noticeably behind. Where AMD gains ground is in FSR 4, which launched alongside RDNA 4 and represents a real quality improvement over FSR 3. Enabling FSR 4 Quality mode on the RX 9070 XT pushes Alan Wake 2 well above 90 fps with minimal visual degradation. The problem is that NVIDIA users can run DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation, which pushes the RTX 5070 Ti into triple-digit frame rates at 1080p even in the most demanding ray traced scenes.
Multi Frame Generation is the variable that makes direct comparisons awkward. NVIDIA’s MFG generates additional frames using AI, which inflates reported frame rates in ways that don’t always translate to equivalent input responsiveness. At 1080p with high base frame rates, the latency hit from MFG is less punishing than at 4K – so the RTX 5070 Ti’s MFG advantage at this resolution is more practically usable than at higher resolutions where base frame rates are already low.
Spider-Man 2 and Control: Where the RX 9070 XT Fights Back
Not every ray tracing implementation favors NVIDIA. Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and Control both show tighter margins between the two cards, and in a handful of scenarios, the RX 9070 XT edges ahead when comparing native rendering performance. Spider-Man 2’s ray traced reflections and ambient occlusion run efficiently on RDNA 4, and at 1080p the two cards sit within 5-10 fps of each other in most scenes. The RX 9070 XT averaging around 80-90 fps native in Spider-Man 2 with ray tracing on High is a strong result for a $599 card.
Control, which originally helped define what hardware ray tracing could look like in a real game, now runs smoothly on both cards at 1080p with all ray tracing effects enabled. The RTX 5070 Ti holds a lead, but it’s the kind of lead that only matters if you’re chasing a specific frame rate ceiling. Both cards deliver well above 100 fps in Control with ray tracing enabled – the RTX 5070 Ti sitting closer to 140 fps and the RX 9070 XT around 115-120 fps. At that point, the $150 price difference between them becomes harder to justify on performance grounds alone. It’s worth noting that Control was built during NVIDIA’s earlier RT advantage era, and AMD’s relative strength here shows how far RDNA 4’s ray tracing hardware has actually come. For a broader look at how these generational improvements compare at a lower price tier, the Radeon RX 9060 XT vs RTX 5060 Ti ray tracing comparison shows similar patterns playing out one tier down.
The real takeaway from the mid-range titles is that AMD’s ray tracing deficit is no longer universal. It’s concentrated in specific, heavily NVIDIA-optimized titles – and in those titles, the RTX 5070 Ti’s lead is large enough to matter. Outside of that subset, the RX 9070 XT delivers competitive ray traced performance at a price point that makes the RTX 5070 Ti look expensive for what it offers at 1080p specifically.
Which Card Makes Sense at 1080p Ray Tracing
If your library consists primarily of Cyberpunk 2077, Alan Wake 2, or any other title that leans heavily on NVIDIA’s RT pipeline and DLSS ecosystem, the RTX 5070 Ti earns its $150 premium – you’re paying for a meaningfully better experience in exactly those games. But if you’re playing a broader mix of modern titles with ray tracing enabled and want the best performance-per-dollar at 1080p, the RX 9070 XT is the more sensible card, and AMD’s improving FSR 4 implementation closes more of the remaining gap than most people expected it to when RDNA 4 was first announced. The harder question is whether anyone spending $599 to $749 on a GPU is still gaming at 1080p long-term – because both of these cards are genuinely wasted at that resolution without a high-refresh-rate display to absorb all that frame rate headroom, and at that point you might as well move the conversation to 1440p entirely.
