Despite Nvidia’s dominance of the consumer graphics card market, AMD’s 7000 series is pretty great… unless you want ray tracing. The advanced lighting techniques are where Nvidia’s cards truly shine, and AMD just can’t keep up — even at (sort of) better prices.

But what about the new RX 9070 and 9070 XT cards? Adam and Will investigate in the latest PCWorld YouTube video.

The Radeon RX 7900 XT is a beast of a card, even if it isn’t up to the level of the RTX 4090 it’s so often compared to. Even without Nvidia’s specialized hardware, it can brute force ray-traced visuals if you make a few compromises. But with the same settings on Adam’s SFF gaming rig, the brand-new 9070 XT shows measurable improvements despite being in a lower weight class by price. It’s now within swinging distance of the 7900 XTX. (Note the extra ‘X’ — ugh, graphics card names are horrible.)

With the latest generation of cards, the Radeon 9070 is now at about the same level as Nvidia’s RTX 5070 for ray tracing performance, which is great since they’re the same price. (Not that you’ll actually be able to pay such prices without a miracle.) The 5070 Ti still performs better than the 9070 XT by about 15 to 20 percent in most ray tracing tests… but since it’s also $150 more expensive, that seems like a pretty good match.