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As a $219 graphics card, ray tracing isn't really a major considering on the Arc B570. Yes, it can run some RT games fine, and it's generally much better with RT than AMD's existing GPUs. We'll have to see how RDNA4 changes things when it arrives.
Most RT games end up being better optimized for Nvidia GPUs, because Nvidia has been pushing the tech far more than AMD or Intel. We selected six reasonably demanding RT games for our testing (and we may add Indiana Jones and the Great Circle at some point in the future).
The Arc B570 does pretty well overall in our geomean for ray tracing. AMD's GPUs fall to the bottom of the charts, though 4K RT proves to be too much for the B570. It's basically on par with the previous generation A770 16GB, despite having far less theoretical compute and a lot less VRAM.
Nvidia's RTX 4060 beats the B570 at 1080p, but the card are basically tied at 1440p. Intel's new budget card also leads the 3060 at 1440p and below. If you're looking for a sub-$250 card that can sort of handle RT, the new Arc B570 might suffice, but in general you'll probably want to just leave RT disabled for this level of GPU.
And now that we have all the rasterization and ray tracing results, we can also look at the big picture. These charts use the geomean of all 22 games that we've tested, with RT basically accounting for a quarter of the overall score.
We think it's fair to say that there are a lot of RT games where the tech doesn't really do much other than tank performance, but there are also a select few games that definitely benefit visually from RT. So, we have far more rasterization games in our suite but still include a handful of RT games to give a more balanced overall view of how the GPUs stack up.
The Arc B570 ends up placing just ahead of the RTX 3060, and the ray tracing games really punish AMD's 8GB GPUs so that they fall to the bottom of the charts at ultra settings. The B570 and A770 16GB end up being pretty closely matched overall. But let's look at the individual games again.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora uses ray tracing, but it's not particularly forthcoming on when and where it's used. Reflections in general don't appear to use RT, which is one of the most noticeable upgrades RT can provide. Instead, it's used for shadows and possibly global illumination and some other effects. What I can say for sure is that nothing in the menus (other than "BVH Quality") directly mentions ray tracing, and the performance hit doesn't seem to be as severe as in some games. Still, since there's supposed to be RT of some form, this one gets lumped into our DXR suite.
The B570 does decently overall, though it's a bit odd how close the A750 gets, even taking the lead at 1440p and 4K. Probable VRAM bandwidth is a factor. For 1080p, the B570 leads everything except the RTX 4060 and B580, and it trades blows with the A770.
If you want a game where ray tracing is both clearly visible and actually makes the game look better, without totally destroying performance, look no further than Control. It's now five years old, and we're using the Ultimate version, but it's still arguably the best example of using RT well. And probably a lot of that is because you're running around the Federal Bureau of Control, an office space of sorts that has good reasons to have plenty of glass windows that reflect the scenery.
AMD's GPUs have a lot of issues with Control, especially on the 8GB cards. Performance degrades over time, which didn't happen a couple of years back. It's almost like AMD stopped worrying about the game at some point.
The Arc B570 is able to match or exceed the performance of the RTX 4060 in this game, not too shabby for a $220 GPU.
Possibly the most hyped up use of RT in a game, Cyberpunk 2077 launched with more RT effects than other games of its era, and later the 2.0 version added full path tracing and DLSS 3.5 ray reconstruction. Ray reconstruction ends up looking the best but only works on Nvidia GPUs, so as with upscaling it can be a case of trying to compare apples and oranges.
We're using medium settings with RT lighting at medium and RT reflections enabled, and then the step up uses the RT-Ultra preset. In all cases, any form of upscaling or frame generation gets turned off.
AMD's GPUs struggle badly in Cyberpunk 2077, but the Arc B570 mostly manages a playable level of performance at 1080p. 1440p is out of reach without upscaling, though the game does have XeSS support if you want to give that a shot.
F1 24 enables several RT effects on the ultra preset but leaves them off on medium. But then 1080p medium runs at hundreds of frames per second, so we went ahead and turned all the RT effects on for our testing.
The B570 results are odd here. B580 does quite well in F1 24, but the B570 falls well off the pace. It could be the reduced VRAM, or perhaps newer drivers have caused a drop in performance. The B570 mostly trails the RTX 3060 in this game, at least in our testing.
Minecraft supports full path tracing, and that kills performance on the AMD GPUs. The Arc B570 does better, but it's only reasonable for 1080p. Performance also dropped quite a bit with the B570 at 1440p and 4K, falling below the A750.
Last on our list of RT-enabled games, Spider-Man: Miles Morales doesn't look as nice with RT turned on as the previous Spider-Man: Remastered. The reflections are less obvious, and perhaps performance is better as a result. But beyond the RT effects, maxed out settings in Miles Morales definitely needs more than 8GB of VRAM.
The B570 does well at 1080p both at medium and maximum settings. 1440p starts to show a lot of performance inconsistency, however, and 4K performance died hard. So stick with 1080p if you want maxed out settings on the new Arc GPU.
One final ray tracing benchmark we have is the 3DMark DXR Feature Test, where we report the average FPS rather than the calculated score. This is similar to full RT in a game, only done via a standalone benchmark and perhaps in a more vendor agnostic fashion.
Things here are... odd. We retested the B580, as the B570 with newer drivers initially delivered better performance. The B580 did improve and is now 15% faster than the B570, right in line with expectations. That's good to see, but then we still have the A750 matching the B580 with the A770 performing 10% faster than the B580. Does that mean the A770 still has more RT performance? It might, or it might just be something where further tuning of drivers will help.
The RT hardware in Battlemage is supposed to be up to twice as fast as what was in Alchemist, so 20 ray tracing units in the B580, running at higher clocks, should be able to surpass the performance of the 32 RTUs in the A770. That it doesn't do so in this test raises some interesting questions, and we don't have all the answers just yet.
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