TECH NEWS – AMD’s ray tracing issues go beyond driver problems. In many games, Unreal Engine is simply built to run better on Nvidia hardware – and several GPU experts are now warning that major features are designed specifically for Nvidia, leaving AMD users at a disadvantage.

The graphics card rivalry between Nvidia and AMD is one of those “eternal” battles in gaming and PC hardware. While Steam surveys consistently show Jensen Huang’s Nvidia in the lead, AMD keeps pushing RDNA 4 with new drivers and patches to catch up. Still, technical hiccups keep AMD from matching Nvidia’s popularity with gamers.

But the catch isn’t all on AMD. According to recent tests by well-known GPU experts, many popular game engines are built to favor Nvidia GPUs over AMD’s own tech, creating an uneven playing field from the start.

Unreal Engine: Is There Favoritism for Nvidia?

According to Techspot, users are reporting that games using Unreal Engine 4 and 5 experience major stutters – and even near-crashes – on Radeon 9000-series cards if ray tracing is enabled. Digital Foundry confirmed this in a video, showing how games like Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice perform much worse on AMD cards. They lean towards blaming AMD’s drivers, but others (including Tech YES City) argue the core problem is that Unreal Engine is programmed and optimized for Nvidia hardware first, not AMD.

NvRTX: Nvidia’s Secret Sauce

Diving deeper into games like Hellblade, The Ascent, and other ray tracing–heavy titles, researchers found that these engines use a custom version called NvRTX, developed by Nvidia for its own technologies. Official Nvidia sources confirm this: the engine branch is tailored for Nvidia, making it easier for developers to use and guaranteeing full compatibility with Nvidia extras like DLSS and DLAA.

The upshot? Most devs pick NvRTX over the more generic DirectX version, which would treat all GPU brands equally. That means Radeon 9000 owners have to play games coded for the competition. While AMD’s drivers have improved, there are still bugs, though these should be fixable. But as long as game engines default to Nvidia’s tools, AMD users can’t get the best out of their high-end cards—even if the hardware is competitive on paper.

Source: 3djuegos