Is RT or PT actually worth the extra money?

Posted by Russo_3@reddit | buildapc | View on Reddit | 55 comments

Hello everyone!

I already ordered an ASUS TUF RTX 5070 Ti OC and it’s on the way, but I’ve started second-guessing myself after seeing tons of GPU comparisons on TikTok. A lot of people say the RX 9070 XT offers very similar raster performance for much less money, and that FSR 4 has gotten extremely close to DLSS.

The thing is, I’ve never experienced proper Ray Tracing or Path Tracing before (my current PC can’t handle it), so I have no idea how big the real-world “wow” factor actually is. I can’t really tell the difference just from YouTube videos, so I’m mostly relying on your experience.

My original plan was to game at 4K with RT Ultra or RT Overdrive using DLSS Quality/Performance. From the benchmarks I’ve seen, RT Ultra stays comfortably above \~ 60 FPS with DLSS Performance, while Path Tracing hovers around \~ 45 FPS.

That’s what’s making me question my choice:

Is the visual upgrade from RT/PT at 4K actually worth the extra 400€ on a 4K OLED?
Or would the RX 9070 XT + native 4K / FSR Quality (or 1440p + FSR Quality with RT) be the smarter move in practice?

Should I return the 5070 Ti and get the 9070 XT instead?

For context:

- Planning to buy a 4K OLED monitor

- Mostly play AAA single-player games

I’d really appreciate honest opinions from people who have actually used both raster-only and full RT/PT setups at 4K. Thanks!

[-]

goonertone75@reddit

Just be happy with your 5070ti, it's a beast of a card, I'm sure you will love it and Nvidia's features (DLss, frame gen etc) are currently better than AMD's, don't listen to anyone that says otherwise. Nvidia support their cards for longer term than AMD which is a must for such a pricey card. RT & PT look proper amazing in my opinion but some people can take it or leave it so that depends on the person

[-]

beedunc@reddit

Nvidia is king.

I fell for the ‘Mac m4 is just as fast as an RTX card’ bs.

…Only to find that the Mac is literally 5x slower than my 5060Ti.

[-]

ThatSandwich@reddit

I think it depends heavily on performance for most gamers.

If something runs at 200+ FPS on high settings, then you enable RT and it goes down to 40 FPS; I'm probably going to opt out of the "superior" experience.

[-]

GARGEAN@reddit

Not a single game drops over 80% of performance when enabling RT. You will get much lower drop when going from pure raster to pure PT with 5070Ti.

[-]

ThatSandwich@reddit

It was a bit of an exaggeration, but there were plenty of games that saw above 50% performance degradation from turning on ray tracing. Battlefield 5 is a good example, where many reviewers saw 50-60% reductions in framerate. Metro Exodus is another example where performance penalties were in the 20-40% range.

The issue also isn't just "framerate" it's 1% and 0.1% lows which define how smooth your experience is, and they tend to be FAR lower when RT or PT are enabled even in titles with more mature implementations.

[-]

ButterscotchTop194@reddit

Tonnes of games are playable with ray tracing, decent settings and at high frame rates. DLSS is a wonder tech.

[-]

ThatSandwich@reddit

Yes tons* of games are playable with ray tracing, but in my opinion they're more playable without it and also don't require DLSS to generate every other frame when it's disabled.

Being okay with bad performance because your graphics card can compensate by interpolating frames is not going to help the gaming industry improve.

[-]

GARGEAN@reddit

The card in discussion is 5070Ti. It can play at 60+fps at 1440p with Path Tracing, not RT, in Cyberpunk with DLSS Quality. No frame generation. No interpolation.

Why the hell are you bringing Battlefield 5 into topic, LMAO? It was 8 years and 4 harware generations ago.

[-]

ButterscotchTop194@reddit

lol, wild

Ill_Difference_4039@reddit

stick with the 5070ti, enjoy all bells and whitles on your new PC

Metaldivinity@reddit

Ray tracing changed my life. Path tracing is too hard for most cards to utilize in 4K. Up to you how much you’ll utilize and appreciate it though.

tup1tsa_1337@reddit

Changed your life? Some people 🫣

That might have been a dramatic way to say it, but it really feels that way sometimes. There were moments playing RE4R in 4K w/RT that for real left me amazed.

otravoyadnoe@reddit

That’s legit hilarious to read given RE4R has one of the most notoriously useless and downright shittiest RT implementations ever.

I disagree. But your opinion sounds subject to an unrealistic personal standard, so I imagine engaging with you in a debate about it will be unproductive.

There’s nothing unrealistic about calling things as they are. There are truly transformative RT (and especially PT) implementations and then there are the shitty ones. RE4R is an absolutely gorgeous looking game but its RT is next to non-existent and is a visual sidegrade at best where you can actually see the difference between on vs off. I bet, you would have been equally flabbergasted with the game’s visuals if you played it with RT off without knowing it.

All of this is entirely your opinion. And yes, an opinion subjective to your own expectations and experience. Also speculative to what you think you know about me (which is nothing, by the way).

>All of this is entirely your opinion.

No, not really. RT in RE4R is dogwater. it can very easily be a contester for literal, no jokes, worst RT implementation in AAA game EVER.

Want to add any facts to that claim?

Sure! Extremely low resolution reflections with extremely low roughness cutoff in generally diffuse environment, paired with extremely bad denoiser.

This shit is shit.

Source?

Delicious_Ad_6@reddit

lol

I am among the most avid proponents of RT/PT on Reddit. I constantly at knifes with local idiots that try to downplay or dismiss RT.

RE4R RT implementation is absolute and utter shit. Absolutely no hesitation here.

Tiny-Extreme-9980@reddit

For some people it's not because they don't like it. I loved RT/PT and bought the best with my budget (5070) and I'm happy gaming with it. Control I can't turn it off anymore, I sometimes do testing with and without RT and I got so used to it that it feels like my game is missing something. This is how I tested settings I 'need' in my game previously, and it's working now as well. Meanwhile some people will have an 5090 and the moment they see some bad RT area or shimmering, it's off for them

No_Guarantee7841@reddit

I would stick at RT on 4k monitor with a 5070ti. For PT need to drop to 1440p on that card with dlss performance to have a good frame rate.

>For PT need to drop to 1440p on that card with dlss performance to have a good frame rate.

That I will argue with. Can reasonably run 1440p PT with DLSS Quality and handily with DLSS Balanced. Can agree that 4K PT is a bit out of its reasonable reach, given that 4K DLSS Performance is higher internal res than 1440p DLSS Quality.

From what i have seen, 5070ti cant hold 60 fps 1% lows on Cyberpunk at 1440p dlss quality/balanced with PT which i consider reasonable frame rate.

lcirufe@reddit

You already bought the thing. Just enjoy it

If you plan on running windows, and plan on playing a lot of RT games, sure.

Linux support for Nvidia cards is in the shitter with their barely updated proprietary drivers, while AMD’s are fully open source.

It depends on your priorities.

Eozef@reddit

T2_daBest@reddit

I use rt but normally don't use pt. It's just so damaging. Honestly I feel like no rt to rt to pt is like 1080 to 1440 to 4k. Rt is a nice jump from no rt but pt tracing is a smaller but still nicer. I use rt on older games and well optimized games so I get a smoother performance. Newer games have Ray tracing broken down to more options or their hybrid versions of Ray tracing and I usually turn down a lot as to me just lowest setting provide a bigger boost from none to some than from some to max. If going 1440p and you can get pretty smooth with dlss and framegen usually at least to 160fps. With 4k I usually don't use framegen as 1 my 4k display only does 60hz and the game I can get over that are just enough to make 60 fps close to stable. I think it's more worth it playing at 1440p being able to max settings with dlss and framegen. For 4k using just upscaling fsr4 where native is close enough to dlss4 and imo the 9070xt win the value. The 5070ti is a great card and nothing to second guess as you'll enjoy and as titles get more demanding can throw framegen at it.

RedLimes@reddit

9070XT is good at Raytracing, just not PT, which is still limited to a handful of games but expanding. At 4K it's only a couple fps behind 5070ti in RT.

5070ti is certainly better all around, particularly on the software feature side. Not worth 400€ extra to me but value can be really subjective so there's no way to answer for you.

KREID68@reddit

Keep in mind FS4 is in a lot less titles than DLSS. Even though it is a big step forward from AMD as an upscaler, you would probably need to use optiscaler to put into a lot of games.

AzureBat@reddit

I got downvoted saying this exact thing in another thread. Ah the fickleness of Reddit.

Honestly I don’t think RT or PT are worth the extra money, but DLSS is. And since op already has the 5070 Ti AND wants to go up to 4k, better to just stick to the 5070 Ti.

Yea I had both the rx580 and rx5700xt and don't regret either of those cards but upgraded to Nvidia for DLSS after the 5700xt.

G00oner20@reddit

Yeaa, after the fiasco wiht rdna3 (software wise) and having to use Optiscaler wiht rdna 4, doesnt make sense going 9070xt over 5070ti

A_Fat_Sosig@reddit

youre gonna want dlss and frame gen more than RT if you play 4k. RT is cool but almost always kills performance more than I’m willing to tolerate. The answer for you might be to swap for 9070 XT if you were gonna play at 1440p since the 5070 ti isn’t going to crush RT gaming, but you’ll be glad to have nvidia’s superior upsclaing when you get a 4k display

Keep the 5070Ti, it’s a beast and is compatible with everything, no driver struggles.

Enjoy!

dsanen@reddit

It depends on the game. But everything is worth the extra money if you have it. If you can part with the cash, you’ll see a benefit, the thing is that it will not be like the benefit of having no gpu vs any gpu.

Exclusively for gaming I would get the 9070xt to save money. RTX is very situational (though it looks really good in some games), and the frame generation can be matched with lossless scaling or optiscaler, even in older cards.

But I don’t exclusively game, and the 5070ti is a better GPU on all fronts, I don’t see why you need to regret the purchase.

>and the frame generation can be matched with lossless scaling or optiscaler

That is not really true. DLSS FG is hands down best FG out there, with both best framepacing and generation quality. That, paired with much better and much more prevalent Reflex on NV cards, makes FG experience quite different from what's possible on AMD.

Yeah it’s not a 1 to 1. But it looks ok. It’s arguable when you have more true frames on a 9070xt vs a lower end nvidia card. But I don’t see a comparison to make on a 5070ti.

What I was writing was more like : if you are willing to save money, and you do just games, you scrape all you have available to bridge the gap. But if you have the money for a 5070ti, then just use that. It’s just a better gpu for games AND productivity.

If you second guess yourself about the price side of things, just return your TUF and order the cheapest 5070 Ti that’s available to you. I bet there’s a €100+ difference in there alone. I have a Windforce (Gigabyte’s one) and it’s absolutely fantastic. Basically any 5070ti will do just as fine with some uv+oc and fan curve tuning.

no6969el@reddit

Well I find the best recipe is Dlss quality while running raytracing medium/high depending on the game.

You can scale the Dlss setting depending on your GPU.

Lucario-Mega@reddit

If it’s worth the time for that 300+, go for it.

neverspeakawordagain@reddit

The 9070 xt is good. The 5070 Ti is better. Enjoy what you have.

ilikewolves@reddit

I have a 5070 ti and I will say I didn’t think path tracing made that much of a difference until I played resident evil requiem with it on. It 100% made a difference and felt like a “next gen” game.

It depends on the game but after experiencing PT on that game I’m glad I chose the gpu I did.

horizon936@reddit

Get a 165 or 240 hz 4k monitor and it will be worth not only for PT but for power efficiency, OC/UV potential, DLSS 4.5, MFG, Reflex and more. It's the better card by a decent margin.

A 5080 will be more PT-cabale but the 5070 Ti can run it too, just with a bit suboptimal of a latency. My overclocked 9800x3d 5080 PC runs Cyberpunk PT at 70 fps with DLSS Performance. This props it up to 170+ fps with MFGx3. Imagine the same but 20% less fps and the latency that comes with that.

And yeah, PT is the truly transformative RT. "Normal RT" is pretty much "make the game harder to run, so that developers have an excuse to not spend time baking lighting manually".

poofyhairguy@reddit

If you can afford it than keep it.

Personally I put a lot of value into how much value my gaming PC is, but it means I never get top tier parts.

NapoleonBlownApart1@reddit

Easy to run ray tracing is crap and not worth it.

Pathtracing or full feature hardware lumen in editor with low downsampling factors (multiple times more intensive to run than epic/ultra in released games) is amazing and absolutely worth it, unfortunately most games are too optimized and ray tracing ends up sacrificed.

Charrbard@reddit

Absolutely, yes. Games like Cyberpunk and Indiana jones seem very wrong without it.

Lucky_Comfortable835@reddit

DLSS is an incredible feature and Nvidia is serious about performance with new updates and huge improvements. The 5070 is an excellent card with all that support.

RayDaug@reddit

This is a highly subjective and polarizing question. People tend to either love or hate RT/PT. For the most part, it mostly comes down to how much you value framerate.

I have a 5070ti and RT to me is a setting that I only really notice when I'm looking for it. When I'm not staring at puddles, RT just makes my framerate worse. I would rather have DLSS Quality/DLAA and no RT with a higher framerate, than crank up the DLSS just to make RT work at levels that are acceptable to me.

If you're fine with 60fps and higher levels of DLSS, then there's no reason to not use RT.

"Hating" RT/PT is a meme in itself. It is a rendering technique. Objectively better than current raster stack of real-time rendering. One can dislike temporal artifacts or think that performance impact is too high, but "hating RT" is pure YT-brained stupidity.

Random_Sime@reddit

Idk is it worth it to you?

WinnerOk9732@reddit

i would stick with the 5070ti for that frame generation especially if you are planning on getting a 4k monitor. I played pragmata with path tracing and it looked amazing.