The most recent AMD Radeon GPUs could have wowed us in most of our recreation benchmarks, however I’ve lately been making an attempt them out with the brand new path tracing mode in Doom The Darkish Ages, and located that that is one space the place AMD nonetheless has a considerable recreation of Nvidia catch-up to play. Path tracing is a extremely demanding type of pure ray tracing that makes gaming graphics look tremendous practical, and AMD says its newest GPUs can do it, however my take a look at outcomes present that Nvidia has a giant higher hand right here.
As I discovered in my latest AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT overview, you do not want an Nvidia GPU to run Doom The Darkish Ages at first rate settings – even on the Extremely Nightmare settings, which incorporates numerous ray-traced eye sweet, this finances AMD GPU will run the sport at 74fps. Nevertheless, path tracing is a distinct story. This superior type of ray tracing is not supported by many video games but, however it does make a considerable distinction to the lighting in a scene, making for a way more practical picture.
The picture above exhibits a scene with path tracing enabled, whereas the picture under exhibits the identical scene with out it. Each of them look good, however you possibly can see that path tracing provides a complete new degree of realism to the scene, trying much less flat, and with the lighting affecting the colours and shadows of objects rather more realistically.
Path tracing is awfully demanding, although, and I needed to see what it is advisable to run it. I firstly needed to see if this was an space the place Nvidia’s new RTX 5000-series GPUs provide a good step up in efficiency from their predecessors, however I additionally needed to see how AMD’s new GPUs dealt with it. In spite of everything, ray tracing is an space the place, till now, AMD has lagged behind Nvidia.
As you possibly can see within the graph above, path tracing is an absolute GPU killer on this recreation in the event you do not enlist any assist from DLSS or FSR. Even the mighty Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 solely averages 55fps on this recreation at 1,920 x 1,080. That is an excellent 11fps in entrance of the RTX 4080, demonstrating the advantages of Nvidia’s newest RT cores, whereas the RTX 5070 averages 36fps.
Worryingly for AMD, although, each its 9070-series GPUs fail to common 30fps right here, regardless of the 9070 XT being significantly dearer than the RTX 5070 at present costs. I do not anticipate the 9070 XT to compete with the RTX 5080, in fact, given the massive worth distinction, however I’d anticipate it to beat the 5070.
With body charges this low, you really want to allow DLSS or FSR to make the sport playable, so I enabled each these applied sciences on the High quality setting to evaluate the influence. As you possibly can see within the graph under, the RTX 5080 then averages 90fps, with a 1% low of 74fps, which is stable in motion, and provides you some headroom to allow body gen too (extra on that later). In the meantime, the RTX 5070 nearly handles this recreation at 60fps, however the 9070-series GPUs lag effectively behind.
To make issues worse for AMD, this recreation would not assist its newest upscaling expertise, FSR 4, so you possibly can solely use an older model of FSR. It appears to be like horrible, with blurriness, distortion, and noise across the edges of objects. As you possibly can see within the picture under, enjoying the sport with Nvidia DLSS 4 (which makes use of the brand new transformer mannequin), makes for rather more element and sharpness. If Doom The Darkish Ages provides assist for FSR 4, then that may assist AMD right here, however in the intervening time, it is a clear win for Nvidia.
Then we come to border gen, which I do know is a divisive matter amongst players. My very own opinion is that body gen could be a great tool within the field to present you a smoother body fee, however that it is solely value enabling in the event you’re already ranging from a good body fee within the first place. It may well’t repair a damaged body fee, and in some video games, it really works a lot better than others as effectively.
Maxing out the body gen on these 5 GPUs, you possibly can see that the brand new Nvidia playing cards speed up proper forward, they usually did really feel clean in motion too. I recorded the latency at 35ms on the RTX 5080, which is larger than the 25ms with out body gen, however it was nonetheless easily playable.
Once more, although, the AMD playing cards actually struggled right here, as FSR body gen would not work effectively on this recreation in any respect. AMD is engaged on a type of AI FSR body gen in the intervening time, however proper now the one possibility is to make use of its present implementation, which ends up in body charges leaping in every single place in Doom The Darkish Ages. As you possibly can see, the 1% lows are nonetheless beneath 50fps on each GPUs in consequence.
Transfer as much as 1440p, and Doom The Darkish Ages will effectively and really punish your GPU in the event you allow path tracing. Not one of many 5 GPUs I examined might obtain a good body fee with out DLSS or FSR enabled, as you possibly can see within the graph above.
Once more, nonetheless, the Nvidia GPUs deal with this workload higher than the AMD GPUs, and the sport is playable on the RTX 5080 in the event you allow DLSS on the High quality setting – it will likely be even higher in the event you drop to the Balanced setting, which nonetheless appears to be like first rate with the brand new DLSS transformer mannequin. I have not included the body gen outcomes for this decision, as solely two of the GPUs had a good sufficient place to begin to allow it, however you possibly can see how a lot AMD’s GPUs wrestle with this workload in the intervening time.
Don’t fret in the event you personal an AMD GPU and wish to play Doom The Darkish Ages – it nonetheless appears to be like unbelievable with out path tracing, and it runs easily on the brand new GPUs at Extremely Nightmare settings. Nevertheless, Nvidia has chalked up a really clear win right here, displaying that AMD nonetheless has an space the place it must catch up, in addition to the necessity to get FSR 4 into new video games.
That mentioned, there are additionally many cases the place our AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT overview confirmed that this GPU is rather more highly effective than the RTX 5070, and it additionally has 16GB of VRAM, which is changing into extra necessary within the newest video games. In the event you’re in search of a GPU improve, check out our information to the most effective graphics card, the place we take you thru all our favourite choices at a variety of costs.
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