Radeon RX 9070 XT hits 54x ray tracing boost in preview test

Microsoft's DirectX 12 Agility SDK 1.722 Preview introduces Clustered Geometry, Partitioned Top-Level Acceleration Structures, and indirect acceleration-structure builds. AMD added support for these features on RDNA 4 GPUs on November 3, 2026, through preview driver 26.20.12.01 for Radeon RX 9000 series products.

Image: Digital Citizen

Tester Osvaldo Pinali Doederlein ran a Radeon RX 9070 XT sample at 1600 by 920 with approximately 91 million triangles. Acceleration-structure memory consumption dropped from 7,518 MB to 771 MB, while rebuild times fell from 600 milliseconds to 2.6 microseconds. Raising the top-level acceleration structure count to 10,000 pushed performance gains past 50 times. At 4K resolution, the test improved from 1.6 to 28 FPS.

The gains stem from reduced overhead during acceleration-structure rebuilding rather than faster ray traversal. Ray dispatch performance occasionally regressed by up to 40 percent at 4K. The test remains synthetic, and integrating Clustered Geometry requires engine-level changes for real games.