AMD’s recently launched RX 7900 XTX has received a warm reception, largely due to the value it offers compared to Nvidia’s rival RTX 4080. However, one area where Nvidia still leads is ray tracing. AMD is lacking in the ray tracing department, but the RX 7900 XTX has made huge strides compared to the previous generation.
In the last gen battle, ray tracing was not an option on most AMD GPUs. Nvidia still has the upper hand, but I wanted to take a deeper look at the ray tracing experience on AMD’s latest generation. It’s a huge improvement over last-gen cards, even if there are still significant obstacles for Team Red.
RX 7900 XTX ray tracing, tested in 14 games
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends
Instead of going head-to-head with Nvidia, I focused on the experience of actually owning an AMD graphics card. If you want the best ray tracing performance, Nvidia is still the way to go. Instead of the standard benchmark pack, I jumped into my Steam library and downloaded a little over a dozen ray tracing games, acting like I just bought a new AMD GPU and wanted to see how it would perform.
I also avoided using in-game benchmarks, relying instead on actually playing the game. The goal here was to capture the experience of owning the RX 7900 XTX and what you can expect when you turn on ray tracing. Before that, however, we need to look at the raw performance.
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Without ray tracing, the RX 7900 XTX can handle almost anything you can throw at it. Even in such a demanding game as cyberpunk 2077, you’re watching over 60 frames per second (fps). You’re looking at over 100 fps in many games, and that’s at max settings in native 4K.
Ray tracing changes that dynamic a lot. In general, you can comfortably reach above 30fps in most games with ray tracing enabled, with some titles like Doom Eternal and Resident Evil village showing an excellent frame rate. Other titles suffer though.
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Cyberpunk 2077 produces less than 20 fps, which is unplayable, and Portal RTX it couldn’t run anywhere near the frame rate. Actually, I had to take a detour Portal RTX to low settings, despite the fact that it remained dedicated to ultra settings for other games. That’s a good illustration of why Portal RTX is the most demanding game I’ve tested.
Ray tracing is demanding, so I’m less concerned about average frames per second here. The burning issue was the series of software bugs I was encountering. Especially, Rise it showed a lot of stuttering even after restarting the game several times. In the graph below you can see that on one run the game completely locked up for a few seconds. And I used the latest AMD driver.
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Similarly, Expert 3The next-gen update resulted in several severe crashes during testing. I originally planned to include Warhammer 40,000 Darktide as part of my test suite, but that game showed a nasty bug where turning on ray tracing would remove all textures from the game world.
Admittedly, Witcher 3, Warhammer 40,000 Darktide, and Rise they are all buggy games. I don’t want to blame AMD solely here. The vast majority of titles I tested ran perfectly without any glitches, but these issues are still important to note if you’re planning to buy the RX 7900 XTX.
Get involved in quality improvement
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends
If you plan to include ray tracing, you should also enable scaling. AMD offers its FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) feature for this, which is a bit of a mixed bag. FSR 2, which you will find in games like Marvel’s Spider-Man and Dying Light 2 is a treat. However, the much more common FSR 1 falls short when it comes to image quality, despite an impressive performance boost.
Let’s get performance out of the way first. The FSR balances the scales quite a bit when you turn on ray tracing. Unplayable Cyberpunk 2077 jumps to almost 60 fps, and games like Ghostrunner climb to almost 100 fps. The only exception here is Portal RTX.
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However, you can see that a few games don’t benefit much from the upgrade. Resident Evil village it was possible to play without increasing the size and see only a minor jump. The one that stings is Marvel’s Spider-Man. That game has a nasty CPU bottleneck, so increasing the size did very little to push the game above 60fps.
You can also notice how much fewer games there are in this chart compared to the ray tracing chart above. The games I left out here do not support FSR. While FSR is available in a huge number of games — about 125+ based on AMD’s last count — Nvidia’s competing Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) has wider support. Nvidia has also been very strategic in adding DLSS to games that support ray tracing. Abbreviated from Crash, every game I’ve tested supports DLSS, but only three-quarters support FSR. And of those games, only four support FSR 2.
As mentioned, FSR 1 and FSR 2 are very different. FSR 2 is currently available in around 45 games, but a long list of titles stuck in FSR 1. That list includes popular titles like Cyberpunk 2077, Ghost Runner, and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, among others.
Raw raytracing performance on the RX 7900 XTX is solid, but support for FSR and, in particular, FSR 2, dampens raytracing with AMD’s latest GPUs. There are definitely highlights like Dying Light 2, but they are few and far between.
RX 7900 XTX ray tracing: is it worth it?
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends
After running dozens of benchmarks, it’s hard to say that ray tracing is the RX 7900 XTX’s selling point. This is much more possible than it was in the previous generation, and you can get solid performance with few compromises in other areas. AMD is now at least competing on the ray tracing front.
The main problem is AMD’s ecosystem surrounding ray tracing. Portal RTX is the best example for that. Even with upscaling enabled at the lowest graphics setting, the RX 7900 XTX failed to break 20 fps. Compare that to the RTX 4080. Due to the unique frame generation capabilities of DLSS 3, that card can reach nearly 90 fps with all settings maxed out. Most of that extra performance comes on the back of Nvidia’s software ecosystem. In raw performance, the RX 7900 XTX and RTX 4080 are almost identical, showing how important features like DLSS 3 are.
This does not mean that the RX 7900 XTX is defective. In fact, in the most demanding games I tested, ray tracing had the least impact. Cyberpunk 2077 and Expert 3 they show a slight increase in depth, but I really noticed the ray tracing effects Dying Light 2, Doom Eternal, and Resident Evil village — and the RX 7900 XTX excelled in all of those games.
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Source: newstars.edu.vn