Two Cards, One Target: 1440p Ray Tracing
AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 XT and Nvidia’s RTX 5070 are sitting in the same price bracket, targeting the same buyers, and fighting for the same shelf space. At 1440p rasterization, the gap between them is close enough that personal preference and driver loyalty often tip the scales. Throw ray tracing into the mix, and the picture gets more complicated – and more revealing about where each architecture actually stands.
Ray tracing at 1440p is the real stress test for this tier. It’s demanding enough to separate hardware generations, but not so brutal that you need a flagship card to break playable frame rates. That middle zone is exactly where the RTX 5070 and RX 9070 XT have to prove their value to PC builders who want quality lighting without spending $700-plus on an RTX 5070 Ti or RX 9070 XT Halo edition.
Nvidia holds the architectural advantage in ray tracing – that’s not a matter of opinion, it’s been the consistent story across multiple GPU generations.
Ray Tracing Performance: The Real Numbers
In Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p with Ray Tracing Ultra settings and no upscaling, the RTX 5070 holds a meaningful lead over the RX 9070 XT. Testing shows the RTX 5070 averaging around 65-70 fps in demanding city districts, while the RX 9070 XT lands closer to 48-54 fps in equivalent scenarios. That’s a gap large enough to feel in motion, particularly in scenes with heavy reflections, volumetric lighting, and global illumination stacked together. AMD’s RDNA 4 architecture made serious progress on ray tracing throughput compared to RDNA 3, but closing the gap entirely was never going to happen in one generation.
Alan Wake 2 tells a similar story. Remedy’s path tracing implementation is among the most demanding available on PC, and at 1440p with full path tracing enabled, neither card is comfortable without upscaling. With FSR 3 or DLSS 4 Quality mode engaged, the RTX 5070 averages roughly 72-78 fps, while the RX 9070 XT using FSR 3 sits around 58-64 fps. Part of that gap comes down to pure ray tracing hardware performance, but part of it comes from DLSS 4’s Multi Frame Generation, which Nvidia has refined to a point where frame quality is consistently strong. AMD’s FSR 4, available on RDNA 4 hardware, is better than any previous FSR release – but DLSS 4 still has the edge in reconstructed frame clarity at this resolution.
Control with RTX features and Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition both show the RTX 5070 maintaining that roughly 20-25% lead in ray tracing workloads at 1440p. The consistent margin across different engines and implementations confirms this isn’t a driver anomaly or a per-game outlier – it’s the expected outcome of Nvidia’s Blackwell architecture carrying more dedicated ray tracing hardware per compute unit than RDNA 4’s setup.
Where AMD Closes the Gap
The RTX 5070’s ray tracing lead gets softer when games implement lighter hybrid ray tracing rather than full global illumination or path tracing. In titles like Hogwarts Legacy with ray traced shadows and ambient occlusion, or Dying Light 2 with ray traced global illumination at its lower presets, the RX 9070 XT comes much closer – sometimes within 10% of the RTX 5070. Those are playable, visually strong experiences on both cards without needing heavy upscaling. For buyers who aren’t chasing the absolute ceiling of path tracing but still want hardware-accelerated lighting in modern titles, the RX 9070 XT delivers a fair proposition at its price.
Pricing is where AMD’s argument sharpens considerably. The RX 9070 XT launched at $599 MSRP, while the RTX 5070 sits at $549 – though real-world availability has pushed both cards above those figures. At street prices, the performance-per-dollar math for ray tracing still favors Nvidia, but not by as wide a margin as the raw frame rate numbers suggest. The RTX 5070 is a faster ray tracing card in absolute terms. The RX 9070 XT is a faster rasterization card than the RTX 5070 in several workloads, which muddies the overall value picture depending on what you play. If you’ve already seen the 1080p ray tracing results between these two cards, the 1440p story follows the same pattern but with larger absolute gaps as the workload scales up.
Software support adds another layer to this comparison. Nvidia’s ray tracing ecosystem includes ReSTIR GI, ray tracing denoising optimizations baked into the driver stack, and DLSS 4 as a consistent upscaling option in every major title. AMD’s ecosystem has improved – the Radeon driver team has made real strides with FSR 4 and ray tracing stability on RDNA 4 – but Nvidia has years of developer relationships built around its ray tracing pipeline, and that institutional momentum shows in per-game implementation quality.
The Verdict at 1440p
If ray tracing is a priority in your 1440p build, the RTX 5070 is the correct pick between these two cards – the performance lead is consistent, measurable, and large enough to matter in the titles that push ray tracing hardest. The RX 9070 XT is not a bad ray tracing card by any measure, and for anyone whose game library skews toward rasterization-heavy titles with selective use of RT features, it remains competitive. But in a direct 1440p ray tracing comparison, Nvidia does not lose this round, and AMD still needs another architectural generation to change that outcome.
