August 2, 2023 update: AMD has issued a new Adrenalin graphics driver to resolve an issue its GPUs were experiencing with "Ratchet & Clank": enabling ray tracing in the settings menu was causing GPUs in Rift Apart To resolve the issue, AMD issued a new Adrenalin graphics driver.

The release notes describe the fixed issue as follows: application crashes and driver timeouts may occur while playing Ratchet & Clank: some AMD graphics products, including the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, may experience ray Tracing and Dynamic Resolution Scaling are enabled on some AMD graphics products, you may experience application crashes or driver timeouts while playing "Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart."

There are still some known issues, such as high idle power, which can reportedly be resolved by enabling variable refresh rate if the monitor supports it.

Originally published July 27, 2023: Ray tracing technology is known to challenge even the best graphics cards, but not for those trying to play the new "Ratchet & Clank" game: AMD's RX 7900 XTX Those who are trying to play the new "Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart" game on their graphics cards may want to hold off on hitting the ray tracing on button.

AMD has, in fact, identified some rather nasty performance issues among several different generations of Radeon cards, as a recent Adrenalin driver update note (via Hardware Times) makes clear.

With cards like the RX 6900 XT, for example, Rocket League players have suffered from "intermittent corruption" when Bloom is turned off; RuneScape players have also experienced "intermittent application hangs" with the RX 5700 XT and audio synchronization problems have been discovered when recording with the AV1 codec in the Adrenalin Edition software.

Even AMD's most powerful graphics card to date has been known to stop completely when ray tracing is turned on, the update notes continue.

"Application crashes and driver timeouts may occur while playing "Ratchet & Clank": some AMD graphics products, such as the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, have been known to experience ray tracing and Dynamic Resolution Scaling enabled on some AMD graphics products, such as the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, may cause application crashes or driver timeouts while playing "Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart".

In other words, it is probably known to occur on other cards, and the note only mentions the RX 7900 XTX as an example. In other words, you may not want to worry about ray tracing until a patch is available.

The Red Team is well aware of this issue and is "working with the game developers of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart" to resolve stability issues when ray tracing is enabled.