A lot of AMD fans have pointed out their past graphics cards' comparatively strong raster performance and given a pass on the weak ray tracing as less important to gaming. That's fair, but I think it misses a big-picture point: when game developers can assume users have sufficient graphical power to handle full path tracing, they can stop going through all the effort to pre-bake lighting. That's a massive effort in game dev that can be redirected to actual game development when they know the gamer's system can handle the lighting automatically.
For this reason, I'm very excited that AMD has focused on boosting its ray tracing performance with RDNA 4. For me, that's the most important area for graphics cards these days. When some future gen Xbox and PlayStation can do the full path tracing mode of Cyberpunk 2077 and all the new games of the time, that will meaningfully change game development and we all win. And with AMD graphics chips powering the consoles, this is a critical move.
I'm not certain what level of graphics card is needed for this (others here are more expert on that than I), but my sense is that it's about the RTX 4070. So we need to get that level of tech down to near entry level pricing for gaming PCs and included in the consoles. If the AMD 9070 cards are priced competitively (and if MS and Sony are using that in the next gen console), this could be a huge moment in gaming. I expect the RTX 5060 will also handle this sufficiently at a more entry level price point.
Even for users who think they don't care about the aesthetic improvements gained by ray tracing or path tracing to lighting, you should care about its mass adoption for the impact to game development.
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