Real-time ray tracing is incredibly demanding. The latest graphics cards have dedicated hardware that’s optimized for ray-tracing. The 3DMark DirectX Raytracing feature test measures the performance of this dedicated hardware. Instead of using traditional rendering techniques, the whole scene is ray-traced and drawn in one pass. The result of the test depends entirely on ray-tracing performance. (UL).
Our first indication of ray tracing performance is… not good. In the 3DMark DXR feature test, the RX 6700 XT is matching the RTX 2060, Nvidia's lowest-end GPU from its first generation of RTX hardware. This test is entirely ray traced, so it doesn't tell us how the card will perform in hybrid-rendered scenarios (which is the majority of games that use ray tracing right now), but from a pure ray tracing perspective, it's significantly slower than any Ampere GPU on the market.