I Was WRONG About AMD Path Tracing

Ah, well, well, well. There's nothing more that I like than having to make a video you were not planning to make all because there was some unforeseen bug that completely botched all of your testing and made you look like an idiot in your video to over 30,000 people. Love it. You got to love it, right? Well, for those of you who may not know what's going on, 24 hours ago, give or take, I released a video talking about my AMD 30-day challenge. And basically, I switched over to AMD and I used the 970 XT as my daily driver. And I documented the the whole process, right? using it daily, using it for thumbnails and video editing and recording and live streaming to the channel and playing games and all that stuff. And for the most part, the video is performing incredibly well, and the feedback and support I'm getting is overwhelmingly positive. Thank you so much for all the kind words, positive words, the new subs to the channel. I really do appreciate it. With that being said, towards the tail end of that video, there's a section where I talk about Cyberpunk and I talk about path tracing. And to the best of my knowledge at the time, I presented what I believe to be factually correct information. However, it turns out there was a problem with that information and a lot of you called me out on it in the comment section. Now, before we go any further, I want to show you the clip from that video just so we all have proper context. Now, the one downside here is that if you are really big into ray tracing and path tracing specifically, you don't want to get a 970 XT. You're going to want to get Nvidia. Nvidia is better at ray tracing, especially at path tracing. Yes, AMD is better than they've ever been before at ray tracing, but they're still behind Nvidia. And if you go to something like Cyberpunk and if you enable path tracing, technically you can turn it on, but the performance is not that great. And yes, you definitely have to rely on FSR and frame generation in order to have a decent experience in that game. Hey, uh, editing E-Rock here and I just said you need frame generation and FSR to have a decent experience with patch tracing. Yeah, even with those technologies in Cyberpunk and using patch tracing, you're not going to have a decent experience. As you can see right here, this is pretty rough. So, that's the clip. Now, before we move forward, let me read to you the statement that I posted last night in a community post just so everybody's on the same page. And I think this is really the best summary I can give. I applied the new AMD driver 26.3.1 which released after I completed my testing and I retested Cyberpunk with path tracing. I literally kept the exact same settings. No changes were made. And yes, this time the frame rate was a lot higher. I'll do a follow-up video. That's the video I'm doing right now. My best guess is that even though I applied the settings and restarted the game on the previous driver for the settings to take effect, Cyberpunk must not have applied the settings for FSR and frame generation. This new driver specifically addresses a Cyberpunk bug when path tracing is enabled. It appears this bug totally botched my results. I don't play Cyberpunk. I literally only use it for benchmarks and I usually use the in-game built-in benchmark. The test was ran at 4K resolution and path tracing is known to be super demanding. And a word I forgot to put here is therefore a low frame rate did not surprise me. Anyway, I'm super happy to be wrong. The 970 XT is even better than expected and I get to make more content. Win-win. Okay, so now we have the history in the proper context. So, let's talk about what the results actually are using the latest driver from AMD, which fixes the bug that totally botched my results. This is what you should get with the 970 XT in Cyberpunk when using path tracing. So, this is targeting a 4K resolution. This is using the high settings preset. And this is using path tracing as well as frame generation and FSR set to the ultra performance mode. And as you can see, the frame rate is significantly higher. The frame time graph is way smoother. Overall, this is a much better experience. As you can see, we're well above 120 130 FPS at times. It just depends on what I'm showing you. There's even some parts where I'm hitting 150 FPS during the game play. With that being said, this this is definitely noticeably better than what I presented in my previous video. Now, unfortunately, some people wanted to take the negative approach. After all, it is the internet and YouTube and drama and all that crap. And they just assumed that I was being malicious and trying to make AMD look bad. But the reality of the situation is this. If you think about it logically, why would I put myself through the challenge of using AMD every single day when I have a whole stack of Nvidia cards sitting on the shelf back there just to make a video where I purposely botched the results, go out of my way to try and make it look bad while also contradicting myself in the same video and constantly making AMD look good in many other areas. That makes no sense. Why would I do that? So instead of assuming malice or anything like that, you should just assume, hey, maybe he made a mistake or maybe there's a bug that, you know, botched the results and all of that, which is exactly what happened. And I'm doing a follow-up video just to say, hey, look, I'm not trying to hide anything. I'm not trying to make AMD look bad or anything like that. I want to give honest and accurate data to the extent of what I believe to be objectively and factually true. And when I know that there is a problem, I will do my best to rectify and correct the problem. And and that's what this video is. Now, with that being said, the one thing I want to point out though is even though the frame rate is a lot higher, a lot of that is depending on the frame generation aspect of it. I think we we can all agree on that. And if you look at the video quality, even though we're targeting a 4K resolution and yes, even though it is Cyberpunk and we are using path tracing and we are on the high graphics preset, I don't really think this looks all that great personally. Looks are subjective. Looks are in the eye of the beholder. But I got to be honest, I don't really think this looks that great personally. So, I started to wonder, what if we get off of ultra performance and what if we switch it to quality? We'll still use frame generation. We'll still target a 4K resolution. We'll still use FSR. We'll still use path tracing. Let's just see what FSR quality does over ultra performance and see if it's any better. And as you can see, when we try to rely on FSR quality, yes, the image quality is a little bit better, but the frame rate is so much worse that it offsets the improved image quality. So, I would not recommend using FSR quality with patch tracing. You definitely need to be on ultra performance or the performance mode. And of course, you can lower the resolution to 1440p or even 1080p. I know a lot of people are saying the 970 XT is not a 4K card and I shouldn't be running this test at 4K, but it's my job to test the GPU and to see what it's capable of doing. Obviously, 1440p will be a lot easier to run than 4K. So, yes, you can definitely also lower the resolution. But the thing to point out here is that you can see that I'm in the 40s on the frame rate, which tells me everything I need to know. FSR did not apply properly in my previous video. Frame generation did not apply properly in my previous video. And yes, that bug definitely messed everything up. Now, one final test I wanted to run is what if we still target a 4K resolution with path tracing and we still use FSR with ultra performance, but this time we disable frame generation. What will our performance be like then? And as you can see, we have about 60 FPS. Sure, the 1% and 0.1% lows are lower than that, but we're averaging 60 FPS, give or take. Overall, this is definitely still playable. But again, if you look at the character model on the bike from the side, it does not look that great in terms of overall image quality. But again, some people will care about that, some people won't. At the end of the day, I think the whole point of using path tracing is to really elevate the game to the next level and to make it look as good as possible. But in this particular case, yeah, you're able to use path tracing, but you're also having to use ultra performance on FSR in order to have a playable frame rate. And so, in my opinion, it kind of offsets the benefits of path tracing. But that's just my opinion. You know, take it with a grain of salt. Anyway, that's the main thing I wanted to talk about in the video. I just wanted to write the wrong or correct the error or whatever because I don't want people thinking that I purposely messed up the data to make AMD look bad. Why would I do an AMD challenge and why would I say it ran fine, no issues, blah blah blah for the better part of freaking 30 minutes just to turn around and purposely mess up the data? That that doesn't make sense. Anyway, with that being said, I definitely think the 970 XT is a really good GPU. No, I'm not going to go out there and pretend like, oh, you know, this proves AMD is a lot better than Nvidia and all that. Nvidia still has more market share. Nvidia still has more frame generation features. They have multi-frame generation. They're working on dynamic frame generation. And yes, Nvidia still has better ray tracing and better path tracing support. That's not me shilling for Nvidia or or trying to make AMD look better or whatever. Those are the objective facts at the at this point in time. But anyway, with that being said, I wanted to share the data because I was really kind of taken aback at how many people were talking about my path tracing results being completely wrong. And then once I discovered that, yeah, these results are wrong, I updated the pin comment, I put out the community post, and now I'm making this video. And then I'm going to I'm going to take this video and share it with some of the comments on my previous video just because some people saw the path tracing results and said, "Oh, wow. I can't believe it's that bad." But they actually bought into what I put in the video. So, I just want to correct all that. Anyway, with that being said, guys, look, um, I try to run the channel with integrity and honesty. I am human. I do make mistakes, but, you know, I do the best I can. I'm not some large channel doing the best I can with what I got, right? So, I hope you can understand and appreciate that. Anyway, with all that being said, I got to get out of here. Like, comment, subscribe, all the things. Have a good weekend. Until next time, e- rock

I recently published a video where I tested an AMD GPU for 30 days. This GPU became my daily driver—the Radeon RX 9070 XT. I shared everything that happened along the way. However, in that video, I also showed some benchmarks of the 9070 XT running Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K with path tracing enabled. The performance was terrible. Some commenters challenged this and asked me to re-test. After installing the latest AMD driver, I ran the tests again. These are the new and improved performance results. CONNECT WITH ME --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- EMAIL ErockOnDeckYT@Gmail.com TWITTER https://twitter.com/ErockOnTech INSTAGRAM https://www.instagram.com/erockontech ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Music: Song: Black Hole Music by: [CreatorMix.com](http://creatormix.com/) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Chapters 0:00​​​​ - AMD 30 day challenge video update 0:48​​​​ - Initial Path Tracing Test with 9070 XT 2:00​​​​ - AMD driver update bug fix Cyberpunk 2077 Path Tracing 3:22​​​​ - New Test Results AMD 9070 XT Path Tracing 4:00​​​​ - Mistakes happen 5:05​​​​ - What about image quality 5:35​​​​ - FSR 4 Quality Preset 6:46​​​​ - FSR 4 Ultra Performance No Frame Generation 7:46​​​​ - Final Thoughts ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This video addresses all the following topics: AMD Ray Tracing Path Tracing Cyberpunk 2077 rx 9070 XT Radeon 9070 XT GPU FSR FSR 4 Frame Generation #amd #9070xt #gpu