Using A Path Tracing Benchmark? What AMD card supports Path Tracing?
They all do. They're just not very good at it.
Path tracing isn't magic, it's mathematics, just like any other method of generating computer graphics. You can ray trace or path trace on a GPU with no RT cores, or even on a CPU. It won't run very well, but you can do it. The indie game "Teardown" is fully ray-traced (not rasterised - its use of voxels allows ray tracing to work at low ray count without looking like complete ass), doesn't use RT cores, and is playable (albeit only at relatively low resolutions and frame rates) on old GPUs like the RX 580 and GTX 1060. Nvidia's RT cores are just much better at path tracing than AMD's, and RDNA4 will hopefully change that.
I hate to be that guy, but literally nobody cares about path tracing when it comes with that much of a performance penalty. Not even the most die hard Nvidia zealots running 4090s. Ask anyone running one if they'd rather run this game at 1080p 60FPS path traced or 4K 60FPS with RT and DLSS Quality on their 4K monitors when actually playing the game and not benchmarking.
You don't need to hate anything, I completely agree.
I used Cyberpunk 2077 with PT as an example, because I wanted to find a situation which was as close to a performance of pure ray/path tracing performance as possible. The overwhelming majority of games which use RT or PT, are primarily rasterised, and only overlay the tracing on top for reflections, lighting, and shadows as an additional effect or embellishment on top of the rasterised image.
My choice of example was intended to show a situation where tracing performance is the primary factor in the performance result, and rasterisation isn't significant.
I fully understand that this isn't representative of the difference in performance in realistic gaming scenarios, and I apologise if my choice of example was misleading.
In a more realistic situation, of a primarily rasterised game which uses some traced effects, an RX 7900 GRE is much closer to the performance of an RTX 4070 Ti, and an RX 7900 XTX is often faster overall. The point I was trying to make is that the Nvidia GPU will lose much less performance when ray/path tracing is enabled compared to when it's disabled, and that RDNA4 having 3x the tracing performance of RDNA3 would allow them to close this gap. For example, rasterisation might be 85% of the frame time for an RTX 4070 Ti, with the remaining 15% being ray tracing, while an RX 7900 XTX might need to spend 45% of its frame time on ray tracing; so even though its rasterisation performance is much higher, it might not be much faster overall in games that use ray tracing.
And also, over the next few years, more games will make use of more intensive ray/path-traced effects, so tracing performance will become even more important over time. Even so, I don't expect that examples as extreme as Cyberpunk 2077 with PT will be
directly relevant to the average gamer any time soon, but it is still indirectly relevant, as an indication of ray/path-tracing performance as a component of total gaming performance.
I was trying to highlight the point that RDNA4 having 3 times the ray tracing performance of RDNA3 would neither be impossible, nor would it give AMD a performance lead over competing Nvidia GPUs with similar rasterisation performance. It would merely be AMD catching up with Nvidia. 3 times the ray tracing performance is not equivalent to 3 times the performance in every game that uses ray tracing.
