Alan Wake 2 Path Tracing Benchmarks: NVIDIA RTX 4090 vs AMD RX 7900 XTX
With path tracing maxed out, things get hairy real quick. The Radeon RX 7900 XTX/XT drops below 20 FPS with 1% lows of 8-9 FPS. The GeForce RTX 4090, on the other hand, averages a healthy 59 FPS with 48-49 FPS lows. That makes it thrice as fast as the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, without any Frame Generation or Ray Reconstruction.
The Radeon RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT produce a nearly identical frametime graph with several painful spikes or stutters.
At 1440p, the Radeons drop to nearly 10 FPS with lows of 4-5 FPS. Meanwhile, the RTX 4090 averages a decent 40 FPS, making it four times faster than the Radeon RX 7900 XTX.
To keep the GPUs from melting, we were forced to enable FSR 2/DLSS 3.5. Ray reconstruction is a life-saver for the RTX 3080 Ti, averaging 41.7 FPS at 1080p with path tracing maxed out. The Radeon RX 7900 XTX averages 32 FPS, while the 7900 XT barely falls short of 29 FPS. The GeForce RTX 4090 averages 96 FPS, making it more than three times faster than the 7900 XTX.
At 1440p, the averages drop, but the chart looks mostly the same. 4K pushes the GPUs to their limits. The Radeon RX 7900 XTX averages 17.9 FPS, while the RTX 4090 holds firm at 59.5 FPS. The RTX 3080 continues to outpace the 7900 XTX, averaging 21.5 FPS with lows of 17 FPS, 2x higher than the former. It’s worth noting that even with upscaling in place, the RTX 4090 is more than thrice as fast as the 7900 XTX.
The frametime graph doesn’t reveal anything we didn’t already know. The RX 7900 XTX faces severe stuttering, likely due to path tracing, while the RTX 4090 remains unfazed.
Frame Generation makes the GeForce RTX 4090 unassailable. It already averaged 60 FPS with basic temporal upscaling. FG allows it to achieve nearly 100 FPS with path tracing. That’s remarkable. Alan Wake 2 allows the use of Frame Generation alongside DLAA (native). This renders two frames at native resolution with one interpolated in between. Performance-wise, it’s slower than temporal upscaling but twice as fast as 4K native, which makes sense.
AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 XTX Averages Only 17 FPS in Cities: Skylines II at 4K
Alan Wake 2 ties the ray count to the render resolution. The higher your internal resolution, the higher the number of rays cast. It also means that the DLSS/FSR preset determines the original number of rays cast, before the upscaling/interpolation process. This is highlighted by the GPU-busy charts below:
