Over 25 years of serving tech enthusiasts. TechSpot is a source of trusted tech advice and analysis.
What just happened? AMD’s new GPUs were supposed to have faster and smoother Ray Tracing, but some demanding games are still struggling. The real reason for the poor performance is now apparent. Not just hardware is at play, but also engine choices and driver quirks.
Radeon RX9070, Radeon RX9070 XT and other RDNA 4 based cards should perform better than they did. AMD’s new GPU architecture promises better ray tracing, but the real-world results are quite different.
User reports indicate that Unreal Engine 4 games suffer from severe stuttering when ray tracing enabled on Radeon cards of the 9000 series. Digital Foundry confirmed these issues in a YouTube video that was released recently, confirming frame rate drops and stuttering.
This problem is particularly severe in Hellblade Senua’s sacrifice, where stuttering lasts for several seconds and can freeze the game. Digital Foundry and gamers speculate that RDNA 4’s poor ray-tracing performance could be due to a hidden AMD bug that disrupts the shader compilation. A more detailed analysis by a YouTuber revealed the real culprit.
The Tech Yes City YouTube channel examined RDNA 4 performance for Hellblade, The Ascent and other ray-tracing-heavy video games. Some of these stuttered on Nvidia cards. It found that both Hellblade & The Ascent use a fork from the UE4 engine, but are based on UE4’s framework. Optimised to work with Nvidia cards NvRTXDevelopers chose NvRTX instead of the vendor-agnostic DirectX Raytracing Implementation, forcing Radeon 9000 users to run suboptimized code on new GPUs.
“RTX Branch of Unreal Engine” is a popular way for Nvidia to market its”RTX Branch of Unreal Engine”in order to easily integrate advanced graphics technology into games. NvRTX features GeForce exclusives such as DLSS and DLAA. It also includes real-time denoisers and other AI-based enhancements.
AMD is still catching up with Nvidia despite RDNA 4’s noticeable improvements. Tech Yes City reported that RT effects can cause frame rate drops in Hellblade, and other similar titles, regardless of GPU. Few RX 9070 users are likely to enable the feature. The channel also discovered a bug in AMD graphics drivers. This issue should be much easier to fix with a software upgrade.
