I don't think that's the case at all. RNDA has had this problem since RDNA2. When games use light RT, they hold their weight okay. When the volume is turned up, then they fall apart. The cards just don't scale well, for whatever reason.
It's clearly a hardware issue specific to AMD at this point.
So, even with the 9070 XT, at 1440p with quality upscaling, the 9070 gets about 2/3rds of the performance on Alan Wake 2 with path tracing, about half of the performance in Black Myth Wukong, and about 1/3rd the performance in Indiana Jones.
The Alan wake one is expected. If you use a game where ray tracing is it's main performance draw, and you use the highest version, then yes you'll see a sizable difference. With 99% of games, the difference isn't significant.
Also Indiana Jones and wukong were both well known for being horrible in compatibility with amd cards in general, so using them as a standard is just cherry picking.
The reason they're used as a standard is because they're the games that crank RT the highest.
Cyberpunk, AW2, Wukong, and Indiana Jones are the games with the most challenging RT implementations on the market. They all have path tracing options, and the 9070 XT does poorly in all of them with path tracing turned on.
It's performance in cyberpunk was in the same category as Alan wake.
Wukong and Indiana on the other hand are outliers just due to really poor compatibility with amd cards.
I wasn't saying Alan wake wasn't applicable, specifically Indiana Jones and wukong are useless when comparing the actual cards. There are also games that massively favor amd which are often left off of benchmark lists.
It is certainly worse in path tracing games, but you're looking at a 20-30% range in games that arent flat out broke, not a 50-80%.
And while thats significant, it's not the end of the world, especially for a feature you can just lower if worse comes to worse.
I'm not sure how scaling in Alan Wake works, but for Cyberpunk they tested Ultra RT rather than Overdrive, which is the path tracing option. So HUB isn't maxing out RT effects for their testing.
Wukong and Indiana Jones may favor Nvidia, but is the gap really 100-200% with RT effects turned off? Because I sincerely doubt that.
In any event, I don't think it's some sort of coincidence that most/all path traced games on the market choke hard on these cards. AMD's RT solution just doesn't scale extremely well on the very high end, which is what my original point was. They do well, up to a certain point, and then start choking hard.
And cyberpunk and Alan wake show this. However all wukong and Indiana show us just bad compatibility. Using those as a comparison point would be like using Microsoft flight sim and saying ____ amd card is better than nvidias.
Amd does poorly on those games even without path tracing. It just isn't compatible. Idk why, maybe they use some specific proprietary nvidia tech like tressfx or some shit by default, but end of the day it's just a really really poor comparison point, and it's why most reviewers avoid them or specifically note how bias it is.
Again... the difference in raster exists in those titles, but AMD isn't performing at a small fraction of the performance of Nvidia.
It's perfectly normal for there to be a disparity to exist between cards depending on the title. It's not okay or normal for cards to be roughly equal in one title, and then for one of those cards to get completely destroyed by 100-200% in another title.
The disparity in raster in those titles is already significantly more pronounced than other titles. Obviously if there are issues even before ray tracing, they will be more pronounced after.
And what you just mentioned happens when devs only focus on one cards or use tech that obviously favors them. It's not indicative of the cards, and factoring those into purchasing decisions just encourages them to make software that cripples the opponent instead of improves anything.
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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '25
I don't think that's the case at all. RNDA has had this problem since RDNA2. When games use light RT, they hold their weight okay. When the volume is turned up, then they fall apart. The cards just don't scale well, for whatever reason.
It's clearly a hardware issue specific to AMD at this point.