PowerColor Radeon RX 9070 Reaper Graphics Card Stock Appears in UK

[AusWolf]

Seems to for me - using a 4060Ti in the living room and a 7800XT in the man-cave.

CP2077 Path tracing is about the same framerate on both, but to use it at playable framerates (50+) you need to turn on aggressive performance upscaling AND framegen, so it looks like total ass and the input lag is really really bad. Not unplayable, but definitely offputting enough that I don't think even 30fps console peasants would be okay with it.

This is one of those cases where you just don't use path tracing because it's well out of the reach of either GPU.

This is exactly why I find the "Nvidia has better RT" argument moot. Better or not, it's still crap (unless your remortgage your house to buy a new GPU, of course).

 

[JustBenching]

Seems to for me - using a 4060Ti in the living room and a 7800XT in the man-cave.

CP2077 Path tracing is about the same framerate on both, but to use it at playable framerates (50+) you need to turn on aggressive performance upscaling AND framegen, so it looks like total ass and the input lag is really really bad. Not unplayable, but definitely offputting enough that I don't think even 30fps console peasants would be okay with it.

This is one of those cases where you just don't use path tracing because it's well out of the reach of either GPU.

It's the same framerate because the 7800xt finishes the raster calculations much faster than the 4060ti, not because they have the same RT performance.

 

[Chrispy_]

This is exactly why I find the "Nvidia has better RT" argument moot. Better or not, it's still crap (unless your remortgage your house to buy a new GPU, of course).

By the time mainstream cards have enough RT performance to play CP2077's path tracing mode at 1080p60, CP2077 will look like the 10-year-old game it is by then, and nobody will care.

It's the same framerate because the 7800xt finishes the raster calculations much faster than the 4060ti, not because they have the same RT performance.

But as of 2025 there are only two games that have full path-tracing support - CP2077 and Indiana Jones. Neither of them can be path-traced on hardware less than a 4090 without severe compromise, and both games look far better with hybrid rendering; Cleaner image, sharper textures, more stable light, shadow, and reflections, higher framerate, far better temporal detail, fewer artifacts. You simply wouldn't play with PT other than as an experiment to see how it looks.

Pure path-tracing performance is almost irrelevant for the current generation because it's too expensive to use. Even a 4090 can't handle Indiana Jones without a lot of assistance from DLSS and FG, which takes away a massive amount of image quality for minimal shadow quality improvements that PT brings over the hybrid RT mode that 99.9% of RT-enabled games use right now.

Maybe we can have a pure path-tracing discussion in five years time if and when the hardware catches up.

 

[JustBenching]

By the time mainstream cards have enough RT performance to play CP2077's path tracing mode at 1080p60, CP2077 will look like the 10-year-old game it is by then, and nobody will care.


But as of 2025 there are only two games that have full path-tracing support - CP2077 and Indiana Jones. Neither of them can be path-traced on hardware less than a 4090 without severe compromise, and both games look far better with hybrid rendering; Cleaner image, sharper textures, more stable light, shadow, and reflections, higher framerate, far better temporal detail, fewer artifacts. You simply wouldn't play with PT other than as an experiment to see how it looks.

Pure path-tracing performance is almost irrelevant for the current generation because it's too expensive to use. Even a 4090 can't handle Indiana Jones without a lot of assistance from DLSS and FG, which takes away a massive amount of image quality for minimal shadow quality improvements that PT brings over the hybrid RT mode that 99.9% of RT-enabled games use right now.

Maybe we can have a pure path-tracing discussion in five years time if and when the hardware catches up.

Inyour video he is getting 60-80 fps at 4k PT maxaed and DLSS Q. That's perfectly fine

 

[Chrispy_]

Inyour video he is getting 60-80 fps at 4k PT maxaed and DLSS Q. That's perfectly fine

That's DLSS (temporal blur that smears all the detail in motion) and with frame generation, so his input lag is a ~35fps experience on a pretty blurry image in motion. It would look better at 1440p native, for sure.

Imagine spending over $2000 on a GPU and getting slugging controls that feel like an old 30fps PS3 game. The timestamp I linked he's getting 30-40fps. without framegen. That's the argument for why PT is irrelevant on hardware we have at the moment, because it looks slightly nicer than the hybrid RT mode but takes a crisp, clean, responsive >60fps experience and turns it into a smeary, unresponsive mess even on top-end hardware. For a 9070 or 5070 it's going to be completely out of the question.

 

[JustBenching]

That's DLSS (temporal blur that smears all the detail in motion) and with frame generation, so his input lag is a ~35fps experience on a pretty blurry image in motion. It would look better at 1440p native, for sure.

Imagine spending over $2000 on a GPU and getting slugging controls that feel like an old 30fps PS3 game. The timestamp I linked he's getting 30-40fps. without framegen. That's the argument for why PT is irrelevant on hardware we have at the moment, because it looks slightly nicer than the hybrid RT mode but takes a crisp, clean, responsive >60fps experience and turns it into a smeary, unresponsive mess even on top-end hardware. For a 9070 or 5070 it's going to be completely out of the question.

Maybe we aren't watching the same video. Minute 13 for example, he is getting 70+ fps without FG. So what 30 are you talking about man?

You are saying dlss adds temporal blur, but do you realize what TAA stands for and what it does? That's why native looks worse than dlss, cause it's a temporal AA solution that samples frames.

 

[Chrispy_]

Maybe we aren't watching the same video. Minute 13 for example, he is getting 70+ fps without FG. So what 30 are you talking about man?

You are saying dlss adds temporal blur, but do you realize what TAA stands for and what it does? That's why native looks worse than dlss, cause it's a temporal AA solution that samples frames.

So that's a 4090 being unable to render natively at 4K at any more than 35-38fps, and you're saying 70+ with DLSS quality (66.6% render scale). My linked timestamp is the mid-30fps experience at native 4K.

This is a thread about a non-XT 9070, something AMD claim will match a 4070S, give or take. If the 4090 can't do it without upscaling, then something in the 4070's ballpark has no hope.

Here's the same guy running path-tracing on a 4070. He doesn't even bother trying to do full path tracing beyond 1080p because it's a 30fps experience. DLSS at 1080p means that you're upscaling from 720p which makes image quality absolutely abysmal, and that's why he gives up with full path tracing at that point.

I'm not trying to make the point that path tracing is utterly impossible, just that you need extremely high-end hardware to even have a chance, and even then you're giving up a far better framerate at much sharper image quality and much better input latency in order to do so

For the purposes of sub-$1000 GPUs in 2025, it's going to be hybrid RT rendering for sure.

 

[JustBenching]

So that's a 4090 being unable to render natively at 4K at any more than 35-38fps, and you're saying 70+ with DLSS quality (66.6% render scale). My linked timestamp is the mid-30fps experience at native 4K.

This is a thread about a non-XT 9070, something AMD claim will match a 4070S, give or take. If the 4090 can't do it without upscaling, then something in the 4070's ballpark has no hope.

Here's the same guy running path-tracing on a 4070. He doesn't even bother trying to do full path tracing beyond 1080p because it's a 30fps experience. DLSS at 1080p means that you're upscaling from 720p which makes image quality absolutely abysmal, and that's why he gives up with full path tracing at that point.

I'm not trying to make the point that path tracing is utterly impossible, just that you need extremely high-end hardware to even have a chance, and even then you're giving up a far better framerate at much sharper image quality and much better input latency in order to do so

For the purposes of sub-$1000 GPUs in 2025, it's going to be hybrid RT rendering for sure.

None of that means you have to overexaggerate. Your point if true can stand with the actual numbers, if you have to make numbers then maybe you don't have a point

You literally said he is getting 60 with dlss and frame gen which is just not true according to the video....

I don't see how that's relevant anyways, obviously you won't try to play at a 4k monitor with a card like the 9070 or the 5070. What the 4090 can do at 4k dlss, the 5070 and the 9070 can also do at their target resolutions (1440p). Even the numbers you are using now for the 4070 are wildly inaccurate compared to the video you posted.... Wth man?

 

[Chrispy_]

None of that means you have to overexaggerate. Your point if true can stand with the actual numbers, if you have to make numbers then maybe you don't have a point

There are a bunch of hybrid RT implementations that include some path tracing. PT medium and PT high are still not full PT.

FULL PT (not hybrid at all, which is what you're talking about right? - similar to the full PT implementation in CP2077's RT Overdrive) is not pretty on even a 4090:

So to get input lag down to reasonable levels whether you run FG or not, you have to run DLSS performance, which is upscaled from 1080p, on a $2300 graphics card!
Nobody spends $2300 on a GPU and willingly accepts that it's only good for 1080p.

You literally said he is getting 60 with dlss and frame gen which is just not true according to the video....

Maybe this is the problem, I don't think I said that anywhere. You are having an argument over something I didn't say. If I "literally said he is getting 60 with dlss and frame gen", then please find where I typed that because I don't recall doing so.

I said:

"as of 2025 there are only two games that have full path-tracing support - CP2077 and Indiana Jones. Neither of them can be path-traced on hardware less than a 4090 without severe compromise, and both games look far better with hybrid rendering"​

"Hardware less than a 4090" means I was talking about a 4080S and below, which is more relevant to this 9070 (non-XT) thread, and also means irrelevant to your point of contention with the 4090 video I posted. Less than a 4090 != a 4090.

I also said:

"Pure path-tracing performance is almost irrelevant for the current generation because it's too expensive to use. Even a 4090 can't handle Indiana Jones without a lot of assistance"​

​

So yeah, a 4090 can do it, but it needs DLSS performance which is an insane amount of help. The 4070 video I linked has the 4070 upscaling from 720p (DLSSQ @ 1080p) with full PT and it's barely getting 30fps. You can't save that with framegen because the base framerate is too low and DLLS performance might get you to 50fps but at that point you're upscaling from a 540p image and it's not 1998 any more - people want more detail than that, especially when they paid $600 for their graphics card in 2023.

 

[JustBenching]

Maybe this is the problem, I don't think I said that anywhere. You are having an argument over something I didn't say. If I "literally said he is getting 60 with dlss and frame gen", then please find where I typed that because I don't recall doing so.

Well, you did. I said it's getting 60 to 80 in the video, and you said that that's with DLSS and frame generation, which is not.

So you detected the FG blurriness from a video, a video that didn't even have FG enabled. That's what I call placebo.

 

[Chrispy_]

Well, you did. I said it's getting 60 to 80 in the video, and you said that that's with DLSS and frame generation, which is not.



View attachment 380814



So you detected the FG blurriness from a video, a video that didn't even have FG enabled. That's what I call placebo.

You're not looking at full PT there. I'm pretty sure all this confusion is because you're looking at the wrong section of the video. I assumed you had to be talking about framegen+DLSS because that's the only way the 4090 can get over 60fps in Indiana Jones' fully path-traced mode.

To make this abundantly clear, that's still Hybrid RT at those framerates.
The 4090 struggles to hit 60fps at full PT with DLSS performance (22:01 timestamp).

 

[coozie87]

I guess they're waiting to see Nvidia's 5070 and 5070Ti price/performance ratio in order to undercut it.

Of course they'll undercut it, but by how much? the 10% we had with RDNA3 wasn't enough to win AMD any marketshare, so it's gotta be at least 20%, assuming there's no real value in Neural Rendering or Multi Frame Generation. If either of those features turn out to be game-changers (highly unlikley, but not impossible) then AMD need to undercut price/performance even further to have even the slimmest hope of marketshare gains.

Also, let's be clear, AMD don't just need market share gains, they need a market share LANDSLIDE

Not going to happen, even if AMD gave these away in breakfast cereal boxes we'd stop buying that cereal.
Our mindset is so dedicated to running down AMD the company stands no chance of getting a fair crack of the whip
at any time.
Even IF, by some strange twist this gen proves reasonably successful, I suspect AMD will still throw in the towel and switch
production to other markets.
Why should they have to fight for every sale against a market stacked against them at every turn?

 

[AusWolf]

Not going to happen, even if AMD gave these away in breakfast cereal boxes we'd stop buying that cereal.
Our mindset is so dedicated to running down AMD the company stands no chance of getting a fair crack of the whip
at any time.
Even IF, by some strange twist this gen proves reasonably successful, I suspect AMD will still throw in the towel and switch
production to other markets.
Why should they have to fight for every sale against a market stacked against them at every turn?

Because they've got the console market. Playstation, Xbox, the Steam Deck and the rest of the handhelds all use AMD. No amount of Nvidia kool-aid can change that.

 

[Sound_Card]

My opinion on the matter is that ...

AMD canned Navi 41 and 42 and moved all of those assets/resources to UDNA because I suspect that UDNA is coming out much faster than expected. Possibly 6 months faster than 7900xt to 9070xt. They have a real possibility to beat Nvidia to the market by nearly half a year, 4 months worst case, but possibly 12 months best case. Nvidia's Rubin platform is for enterprise and that's all they essentially have outside their ARM CPU.

Basically, AMD is planing a forward attack for once.

 

[Jtuck9]

My opinion on the matter is that ...

AMD canned Navi 41 and 42 and moved all of those assets/resources to UDNA because I suspect that UDNA is coming out much faster than expected. Possibly 6 months faster than 7900xt to 9070xt. They have a real possibility to beat Nvidia to the market by nearly half a year, 4 months worst case, but possibly 12 months best case. Nvidia's Rubin platform is for enterprise and that's all they essentially have outside their ARM CPU.

Basically, AMD is planing a forward attack for once.

I read that China are banking heavily on chiplets, and I'm not sure if this gives any indication to possible parallelisation (communication) like on the Halo chip.

DeepSeek FAQ – Stratechery by Ben Thompson