Ray Tracing at 1080p: Where AMD and Nvidia Still Diverge
AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 XT has earned serious respect in rasterization benchmarks, often trading blows with Nvidia’s RTX 5070 at a lower price point. But ray tracing has long been Nvidia’s home turf, and 1080p – despite being “lower” resolution – actually stresses ray tracing hardware more than many people expect, since the GPU spends proportionally more budget on lighting calculations than on pixel fill. That gap is worth examining closely before you spend $550 or $650 on a mid-range card.
How Each Card Handles Ray Tracing Differently
The RTX 5070 runs on Nvidia’s Blackwell architecture, which brings fifth-generation RT Cores dedicated to bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) traversal – the core computational task behind real-time ray tracing. These hardware units handle ray-triangle intersection calculations off the main shader pipeline, which means ray tracing workloads don’t cannibalize the card’s general compute throughput as heavily as they once did. The RTX 5070 ships with 48 RT Cores across its 48 Streaming Multiprocessors, and Nvidia has further refined how those cores communicate with the shader array compared to the Ada Lovelace generation.
AMD’s approach with RDNA 4, powering the RX 9070 XT, is a genuine generational improvement over RDNA 3. The RX 9070 XT includes second-generation Ray Accelerators – one per Compute Unit, with 64 Compute Units on the card. RDNA 3’s ray tracing performance was a known weakness, often trailing Nvidia hardware by wide margins even when rasterization was competitive. RDNA 4 closes that gap meaningfully, but the architectural philosophy differs: AMD’s Ray Accelerators handle box and triangle intersection tests but still lean on the shader array more heavily for secondary ray work compared to Nvidia’s dedicated pipeline stages.
In practice, this matters most in scenes with complex recursive lighting – multiple reflections, transparent surfaces, and indirect illumination stacking on top of each other. Games like Cyberpunk 2077 with path tracing enabled, Alan Wake 2, and Spider-Man: Miles Morales with full ray traced reflections all create exactly that kind of layered complexity. At 1080p, the resolution itself is low enough that ray workloads dominate total frame time, so architectural differences show up more clearly than they would at 4K where you’re also spending significant time on shading and bandwidth.
The RTX 5070 also benefits from DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation, which can multiply effective frame rates when ray tracing tanks raw performance. AMD counters with FSR 4 and its own Fluid Motion Frames technology. Neither upscaling solution is equivalent at the implementation level – DLSS 4 runs a neural network inference step that generally produces cleaner results than FSR 4’s spatial reconstruction in motion-heavy scenes, though FSR 4 has narrowed the visual gap considerably on supported titles.
Benchmark Results Across Key Titles
In Cyberpunk 2077 with ray tracing set to Ultra (not path tracing), both cards run at 1080p without upscaling. The RTX 5070 lands around 15-20% ahead of the RX 9070 XT in raw frame rate, depending on the scene. Night City’s dense neon reflections and multiple simultaneous light sources create exactly the workload where Nvidia’s RT Cores shine. Enable path tracing and that gap widens further – the RTX 5070 holds a playable native frame rate where the RX 9070 XT struggles without FSR assistance.
Alan Wake 2 tells a similar story. Remedy’s game uses ray tracing for global illumination, reflections, and shadows simultaneously, making it one of the most demanding RT workloads available. At 1080p with ray tracing on High, the RTX 5070 leads by roughly 20-25 frames per second in the game’s forest and town sequences. The RX 9070 XT is not unplayable by any measure – it reaches comfortable frame rates with quality upscaling – but native performance takes a harder hit than on the Nvidia card.
Spider-Man: Miles Morales offers a counterpoint worth paying attention to. Insomniac’s implementation of ray traced reflections and ambient shadows is well-optimized and doesn’t lean as heavily on recursive ray bounces. Here, the gap between the two cards shrinks to single-digit percentages at 1080p. The RX 9070 XT handles this game’s ray tracing load efficiently enough that most players wouldn’t notice a difference without a frame counter running. It suggests AMD’s improvements are most effective when the workload doesn’t require deeply nested secondary rays.
Dying Light 2 with ray tracing enabled shows the RX 9070 XT performing competitively again. The game’s implementation focuses on shadow quality and indirect lighting in open outdoor spaces, which distributes the workload differently than the dense urban environments of Cyberpunk or Alan Wake 2. This reinforces that the RTX 5070’s advantage is not universal – it is largest in the most demanding, multi-bounce lighting scenarios and smallest in leaner RT implementations.
One variable that shifts these results significantly is whether you count performance with AI upscaling enabled. With DLSS 4 Quality mode, the RTX 5070 can push well above 100 fps in Cyberpunk 2077 with Ultra RT at 1080p output resolution, though the effective render resolution is lower. AMD’s FSR 4 Quality mode helps the RX 9070 XT recover ground, but Multi Frame Generation on the RTX 5070 can produce frame rates that no single-card AMD solution currently matches in the same scenario. That said, frame generation introduces latency, and at 1080p where response time matters most for competitive sensibilities, some players will prefer native or standard upscaling over aggressive frame multiplication.
What the Gap Actually Means for Buyers
If ray tracing is a priority – specifically in the most demanding titles at maximum RT settings – the RTX 5070 holds a real advantage that AMD has not fully closed. The margin is large enough in games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Alan Wake 2 that it factors into a real purchase decision, not just a spec sheet talking point. For buyers who play a mix of genres and only occasionally dive into heavy RT titles, or who are comfortable keeping RT settings at medium rather than ultra, the RX 9070 XT’s lower price and competitive rasterization performance – detailed further in our 4K rasterization comparison – make it a harder card to dismiss.
The more interesting question is whether the RT gap narrows as AMD’s driver team continues to optimize RDNA 4’s ray tracing pipeline. RDNA 3 improved meaningfully over RDNA 2 through driver updates alone, and AMD has been aggressive about delivering post-launch optimizations. The RX 9070 XT you buy today may not perform exactly like the RX 9070 XT six months from now – which is either reassuring or a reason to wait, depending on how patient you are.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the RX 9070 XT support ray tracing at 1080p?
Yes, the RX 9070 XT supports ray tracing at 1080p using RDNA 4’s second-gen Ray Accelerators, though it trails the RTX 5070 in the most demanding RT titles.
How much faster is the RTX 5070 in ray tracing compared to the RX 9070 XT?
In heavy RT workloads like Cyberpunk 2077 and Alan Wake 2, the RTX 5070 leads by roughly 15-25% at 1080p native. The gap shrinks significantly in less demanding RT implementations.
