Ray Tracing Performance Explored
Now that we know how much Ray Tracing can impact performance in this game, especially with the “High” Ray Tracing Preset enabled, we wanted to dive a little deeper to find out how the Ray Tracing quality modes compare in performance. It is this testing below, which leads us to the realization that it is the Path Tracing option that is the major downfall in performance for the AMD GPUs.
GeForce RTX 4090 – Ray Tracing Presets Compared
In this graph above we are first starting with the GeForce RTX 4090 at 4K without upscaling. We are comparing the three Ray Tracing quality presets of: High, Medium, and Low to see how each Ray Tracing quality mode compares in performance on NVIDIA GPUs, then we will look at AMD GPUs below. Right off the bat, we can see that the three modes have a very small difference on NVIDIA GPUs. Remember, at “Low” Path Tracing is NOT enabled, when you enable “Medium” Path Tracing gets turned ON. Therefore, from this, we can conclude that the NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPUs are not taking a huge hit to performance enabling the Path Tracing in Alan Wake 2. This is the opposite of what you will see below with the AMD GPUs.
Radeon RX 7900 XTX – Ray Tracing Presets Compared
In this graph above we are now looking at the same tests done above, but on the Radeon RX 7900 XTX at 4K without upscaling comparing the three different Ray Tracing quality modes. You can see a huge difference in performance between the “Low” Ray Tracing quality preset (which does not have Path Tracing enabled) compared to turning the quality setting up to “Medium” (where Path Tracing is now enabled). It is the enablement of Path Tracing that is killing the AMD Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs performance in Alan Wake 2. Sure, the Radeon RX 7000 series is already slower at Ray Tracing, but it is doubly so when Path Tracing is enabled. That’s a 40% performance hit enabling Path Tracing compared to not.