Exclusive: Cyberpunk 2077 Ray Tracing performance tested on AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT

Cyberpunk 2077 has recently released a Patch 1.2 update that brings a lot of fixes and improvements to the game. Also, it brings the much-hyped ray tracing support to AMD’s latest Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs, now having the RX 6900 XT in our hands, we didn’t miss the opportunity to test its performance.

Even before downloading the new update, I knew the ray tracing performance wouldn’t be that much convincing compared to NVIDIA. However, it isn’t that bad also but is clear that AMD needs to quickly bring its rumored DLSS alternative to compete with NVIDIA.

So, here’s the specs of our testing rig:

• Motherboard: Gigabyte X570 UD
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X
• RAM: 32GB 3200MHz memory
• SSD: 240GB WD Sn550, 480GB Crucial SATA SSD
• Power Supply: Cooler Master 750W
• GPU: AMD Radeon RX 6900XT
• CPU Cooler: Deepcool Gammaxx GTE V2
• Cabinet: MSI Mag Forge 100R

To give AMD the max advantage, we also kept AMD’s Smart Access Memory feature on and tried out with new AMD Radeon Adrenalin 2020 21.3.1 update instead of the 21.3.2 BETA update. Here are the results:

At 4K Ray Tracing Medium

The performance of the Radeon RX 6900 XT is kind of weak at 4K with Ray Tracing Medium and you see there are no reflections, on average you get around 18 FPS.

At 4K Ray Tracing Ultra

With Ray Tracing Ultra at 4K, the game looked beautiful with reflections and shadows. Although things did look great, the performance dipped considerably as you were getting around 10 FPS.

At 1440p Ray Tracing Medium

If you are genuinely looking to play the game with Ray tracing, you should play at 1440p to get a playable experience. So, with Ray Tracing Medium, you get a good 35 FPS on average, making the game playable as well as beautiful looking even though you still the crispness at 4K.

At 1440p Ray Tracing Ultra

Now, with Ray Tracing Ultra at 4K, you get reflections as well that makes the game look even better but the average frame rates drop to 26 FPS, still its kind of playable.

So, you see that new AMD Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs do support ray tracing when you play Cyberpunk 2077. However, the Ray tracing performance of the flagship AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT is still not convincing against that of NVIDIA.

As you see in our ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX 3080 AMP Holo review, the RTX 3080 enjoys NVIDIA’s DLSS 2.0 that significantly enhances the performance of the card. Even at Ray Tracing Ultra, you get a 40 FPS average at 4K, whereas it’s only 10 FPS for AMD.

Still, the first-generation of Ray tracing performance of these AMD GPUs are much like what NVIDIA did with its first-gen RTX GPUs. However, with the DLSS replacement from AMD, we can predict a handsome improvement across both PC and consoles.