Ray Tracing Alan Wake 2
Alan Wake II pushes the boundaries of visual fidelity with its ambitious implementation of “full ray tracing,” also known as path tracing. This means ray tracing handles all lighting, reflections, and shadows, creating a more realistic and immersive environment. The game features ray-traced direct lighting for accurate and dynamic shadows, ray-traced indirect lighting for realistic bounced light, ray-traced reflections on surfaces like water and glass, and ray-traced transparency for convincing interaction with transparent objects.
So to see if this becomes a trend we need to look at the performance in some actual games, as that will provide the most realistic examples of performance and to start we’re looking at Alan Wake 2, where we run with upscaling set to balanced due to how unplayable the game is without it when using ray tracing. At 1440p we found the 9070 XT ahead of the 7900 XTX by 30%, which is a pretty impressive start, but what’s more impressive is that this is still better performing than the RTX 5070 by 18%, which was previously only just beating the XTX here. The 9070 non XT falls just barely behind the 5070 with a margin of error 3% difference between them, and we do see a generational uplift over the 7900 GRE of 38%, so if this trend continues then we’ll be looking at some pretty impressive ray tracing from AMD this generation which even saying that out loud, sounds weird.
At 4K we see the same sort of thing, with the 9070 XT ahead of the 7900 XTX by 30%, along with the non-XT managing to sit a single frame ahead as well, and when comparing to the 5070 we see the 9070 XT ahead by 20%, whilst the non-XT falls 2 FPS behind, which is a margin of error difference anyway. Looking at the 9070 compared to the 7900 GRE we see an improvement in ray tracing of 36%, proving again that this generation’s RT cores are a pretty big step-up for AMD.
