Ray tracing has been one of the biggest buzzwords for desktop GPUs since 2018, which is when Nvidia brought it to gamers with its Turing GPUs. We're on the verge of the launch of the fourth generation of Nvidia GPUs, so it's a good time to analyze whether ray tracing has transformed PC gaming or not.

Even after 6 years of continuous innovation and developer support, "real" ray tracing is only available to a tiny section of gamers. Moreover, there are only a handful of games where it provides any significant visual impact, and that too with a huge performance overhead. I wish the situation were different, but ray tracing is still not worth it — and this will likely remain true in 2025 as well.

Ray tracing is still prohibitively expensive

You need at least $600 to enter

You might think my "math is not mathing," but hear me out. When ray tracing GPUs first came out, Nvidia faced a lot of flak for hiking up the prices of its RTX 2000 GPUs. Despite prices going down with the RTX 3000 series (if you found a card at MSRP), the RTX 4000 GPUs reverted the market to a point where most people can only afford the RTX 4060 — the lowest-tier current-gen offering.

You might point out that the RTX 4060 costs only around $300, but I'll argue that to truly experience ray tracing at 1440p or 4K resolutions, you need at least an RTX 4070 Super, which costs $600. This prices out most gamers from experiencing the hyped ray-traced visuals of the latest titles. Even if you're playing at 1080p with an RTX 4060, you'll have to use the lowest settings with DLSS Performance mode to breach 60 FPS (barely) in Alan Wake 2, at which point the exercise is fruitless.

When only a small percentage of users can experience ray tracing in its intended form, the technology is far from being considered mainstream. The RTX 5000 GPUs will only widen this price gap further when they launch early next year.

It's only game-changing in a handful of games

I can count them on one hand

After 6 years in existence, you'd hope that we'd have at least dozens of ray-traced titles where turning the tech on delivers a night-and-day difference in visuals. However, there are arguably just 4 standout examples of such games — Cyberpunk 2077, Alan Wake 2, Control, and Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition (also supported by Hardware Unboxed's ray tracing video).

Other memorable examples of ray-traced titles are Watch Dogs: Legion, Dying Light 2 Stay Human, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, but these titles look stunning even without turning ray tracing on. If you're going to the trouble of spending $600-$1000 on a GPU for additional eye candy, there had better be more than 4 games that justify the investment. Sadly, that isn't the case yet. And I'm willing to bet that list won't change much in the next year either.

The FPS hit is too much to digest

Even when the visuals are worth it

Finally, ray tracing still comes with a huge performance overhead that can't always be justified. If you have a capable RTX 4000 GPU, sure, go ahead and turn Frame Generation on, and play comfortably at 60+ FPS at 1440p High settings. For the rest of the 92-95% people (according to the Steam Hardware Survey), however, it's better to keep ray tracing turned off.

The thing is, the games that are the poster children of ray tracing are the same ones that most gamers can't afford to run it on. For instance, I had to turn it off completely on my RTX 3080 to get 60+ FPS in Alan Wake 2 at the High preset. Even without RT, the game looks phenomenal, but what's the point of it all, if an 80-class last-gen GPU has to skip ray tracing to achieve a smooth experience?

Is ray tracing worthwhile?

Unfortunately, no, the desired benefits of ray tracing are just not our reality yet. More games would need to make use of ray tracing, with less impact on FPS during gameplay. I am still waiting for these things to change before I'd get a GPU in hopes of using this feature.