The RX 7900 XTX from AMD is the latest GPU Team Red has released. This time, AMD’s packed the GPU with top-notch specs to run every task put in front of it. But in this article we will look at some specific 7900 XTX performance and resolve the question, can the 7900 XTX do ray tracing?
First off, the 7900 XTX is not built to support perfect ray tracing effects. This new technique requires the GPU to be able to follow the traces of light perfectly and the software built on the RX 7900 XTX is not capable of doing it as well as expected.
So no, Team Red’s flagship GPU can’t handle ray tracing as well as the Nvidia competition cards can. Although this GPU is capable of top rasterization and has proven how much better it can perform over the RTX 4080 (direct competition), the minute ray tracing turns on 7900 XTX performance drops drastically.
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The Benchmark Lab has done a direct comparison between the RX 7900 XTX vs RTX 4090 to test ray tracing performance and we can see how deep the FPS falls in the cases when this feature is enabled.
In games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Spiderman, the RX 7900 XTX does well when compared with the RTX 4090 until RT is toggled on – a difference of around 20 FPS can be appreciated between the two setups when this feature is present in Cyberpunk 2077. This is a big fall, especially when seen with the help of a strong processor such as the R9 7950X.
Why does AMD have no ray tracing?
Nvidia’s ray tracing is the result of years of capable hardware and software optimization. Nvidia’s gotten the time to build its GPUs to resolve these solutions.
AMD, on the other hand, hasn’t had the time to resolve this issue. Although AMD relies on its incredible rasterization power, the technology its using to resolve ray tracing is just not good enough.
And the truth is that AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) upscaling technique is not good enough to replace DLSS and ray tracing – although neither is necessary for gaming. Equally, there are not really enough games that support AMD’s FSR.
