Tested: AMD’s 9070 and 9070 XT cards are pretty good at ray tracing

Despite Nvidia’s dominance of the consumer graphics card market, AMD’s 7000 series is pretty great… unless you want ray tracing. The advanced lighting techniques are where Nvidia’s cards truly shine, and AMD just can’t keep up — even at (sort of) better prices.

But what about the new RX 9070 and 9070 XT cards? Adam and Will investigate in the latest PCWorld YouTube video.

The Radeon RX 7900 XT is a beast of a card, even if it isn’t up to the level of the RTX 4090 it’s so often compared to. Even without Nvidia’s specialized hardware, it can brute force ray-traced visuals if you make a few compromises. But with the same settings on Adam’s SFF gaming rig, the brand-new 9070 XT shows measurable improvements despite being in a lower weight class by price. It’s now within swinging distance of the 7900 XTX. (Note the extra ‘X’ — ugh, graphics card names are horrible.)

With the latest generation of cards, the Radeon 9070 is now at about the same level as Nvidia’s RTX 5070 for ray tracing performance, which is great since they’re the same price. (Not that you’ll actually be able to pay such prices without a miracle.) The 5070 Ti still performs better than the 9070 XT by about 15 to 20 percent in most ray tracing tests… but since it’s also $150 more expensive, that seems like a pretty good match.

Adam says that on most of the games you’d actually want ray tracing for, like Obsidian’s new Avowed, it’s getting to a much more solid frame rate at 4K with high settings and upscaling tech applied. Going for full path tracing, you’ll see some dramatic performance hits even with the RX 9070 XT. (It’s possible that this makes it hit the VRAM limitations.) Indiana Jones was a particularly bad example here.

Bottom line? The new AMD cards make ray tracing achievable for visually intense games at 1440p, and occasionally even 4K as long as you’re willing to make a compromise or two versus the full-fat visuals you’d expect from a $1,000+ GPU. It’s an improvement over the previous generation, especially when you consider the debut 9000-series cards are far less expensive. Things might improve a bit with new drivers, too.

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