AMD GPU fps drops in UE4 games could be Nvidia's fault, says report

A recent series of Reddit complaints have linked new AMD and Intel gaming GPUs to problems with playing certain Unreal Engine 4 games with ray tracing. According to a YouTuber's tests, however, the problem can be traced back to Nvidia.

No, Nvidia hasn't set out to deliberately sabotage its competitors on our best graphics card shortlist. Instead, it appears a proprietary version of Unreal Engine 4 in use by affected games is causing the problem. That build is believed to be optimized for Nvidia-specific ray tracing tech, causing stuttering to occur when ray tracing is enabled in those games on cards made by AMD and Intel.

YouTuber Tech Yes City recently investigated the AMD GPU stuttering issues. Using an AMD Radeon RX 9070 16GB and an Intel Arc B580 12GB, the YouTuber tested two Unreal Engine 4 games that suffered with these problems. Both games saw stutters, artefacting, and frame-rate drops when ray tracing was enabled on both GPUs, suggesting that the root cause of the performance problems isn't poor AMD driver optimization but another underlying issue.

Tech Yes City believes that the issue is the games being built using Nvidia's RTX branch of Unreal Engine that feature its own ray tracing technology that's optimized for Nvidia GeForce RTX cards. In contrast, a standard Unreal Engine 4 build uses DirectX ray tracing (DXR) as part of DirectX 12, which is more readily supported by AMD and Intel GPUs.

These findings seem to match up to the experiences found in this Reddit post, with users discussing how the combination of DX12, UE4, and ray tracing is causing problems when running these games on the latest AMD and Intel cards.

Neither AMD or Intel have commented on this issue so far, but we'll be hoping that it's limited to just a few games and isn't a widespread problem.

This unusual UE4 issue aside, AMD has built the best GPU for the average gamer in the RX 9070 XT so far, and you can check out our thoughts about it in our AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT review.

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