Has AMD finally improved raytracing? We tested the RX 7900 XTX in 14 ray tracing games to see if it's a good option for your next upgrade.
AMD’s recently launched RX 7900 XTX has received a warm reception, mainly on the back of the value it offers compared to Nvidia’s competing RTX 4080. One area where Nvidia still has a lead, though, is ray tracing. AMD is lacking in the ray tracing department, but the RX 7900 XTX has made some big strides compared to the previous generation.
Related I avoided using in-game benchmarks, as well, 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 turning on ray tracing. Before that, though, we need to look at raw performance. Cyberpunk 2077 produces less than 20 fps, which is unplayable, and Portal RTX couldn’t run anywhere near a playable frame rate. In fact, I had to turn Portal RTX down to Low settings, despite staying committed to Ultra settings for the other games. That’s a good illustration of why Portal RTX is the most demanding game I’ve tested.
Admittedly, The Witcher 3, Warhammer 40,000 Darktide, and The Ascent are all buggy games. I don’t want to place the blame strictly on AMD here. The vast majority of titles I tested worked just fine without any bugs, but these issues are still important to point out if you plan on buying an RX 7900 XTX.
You can see a few games don’t benefit much from upscaling, though. Resident Evil Village was playable without upscaling, and it only sees a minor jump. The one that stings is Marvel’s Spider-Man. That game has a nasty CPU bottleneck, so the upscaling did very little to push the game above 60 fps. Raw ray tracing performance on the RX 7900 XTX is solid, but it’s the hit-or-miss support for FSR and, in particular, FSR 2, that puts a damper on ray tracing with AMD’s latest GPUs. There are definitely highlights like Dying Light 2, but they’re few and far between.