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).
3DMark's DXR feature test is a worrying sign of things to come when looking at the 7900 XTX's ray tracing performance. Not only is it 41% slower than the RTX 4080, it's only slightly faster than the RTX 3080 10GB that launched over two years ago, for less money.