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What simply occurred? Ray tracing was imagined to be quicker and smoother on AMD’s newest GPUs, but some demanding video games nonetheless wrestle. A better look now factors to the actual purpose behind the disappointing efficiency. It is not simply {hardware} limitations at play – engine decisions and driver quirks are additionally shaping the expertise.
Radeon RX 9070, Radeon RX 9070 XT, and different RDNA 4-based playing cards ought to carry out a lot better than they’ve. AMD’s newest GPU structure guarantees improved ray tracing efficiency, however real-world outcomes inform a distinct story.
In line with person reviews, Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) video games expertise extreme stuttering on Radeon 9000-series playing cards when ray tracing is enabled. Digital Foundry replicated these points in a latest YouTube video, confirming important body price drops and stuttering in UE4 titles.
The issue is very extreme in Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, the place stuttering can final a number of seconds and successfully freeze the sport. Digital Foundry and the gaming neighborhood speculate that RDNA 4’s poor ray tracing efficiency might end result from a hidden AMD driver bug that disrupts shader compilation. Nevertheless, a extra detailed evaluation by one other YouTuber doubtless uncovered the true perpetrator.
The YouTube channel Tech Sure Metropolis examined RDNA 4 efficiency in Hellblade, The Ascent, and different ray tracing-heavy video games – a few of which stuttered even on Nvidia playing cards. It found each Hellblade and The Ascent are primarily based on the UE4 framework however use a fork of the engine optimized for Nvidia playing cards referred to as NvRTX. Builders selected NvRTX over the vendor-agnostic DirectX Raytracing implementation, successfully forcing Radeon 9000 homeowners to run sub-optimized code on their new GPUs.
Builders doubtless selected NvRTX as a result of Nvidia markets its “RTX Department of Unreal Engine” as a straightforward solution to combine superior graphics applied sciences into video games. NvRTX contains GeForce-exclusive options reminiscent of DLSS, DLAA, Nvidia Picture Scaling, and real-time denoisers, together with different AI-based enhancements.
Regardless of RDNA 4’s notable enhancements, AMD continues to be taking part in catch-up with Nvidia in ray tracing. Tech Sure Metropolis famous that RT results in Hellblade and comparable titles can tank body charges no matter GPU, and few RX 9070 homeowners are doubtless enabling the function anyway. The channel additionally uncovered a bug in AMD’s graphics drivers, a problem that needs to be far simpler to resolve with a software program replace.