Real-time ray tracing arrived on consumer GPUs as an optional add-on that you could switch on if your graphics card had the necessary hardware. While seemingly gimmicky at first, the technology evolved as better hardware and implementation helped promote its visual benefits. The performance overhead, however, is still not digestible for the vast majority of gamers. Turning ray tracing off used to be the go-to tip to "boost" framerates, but even that option is disappearing in the latest titles. Ray tracing hardware never kept pace the way it needed to, leaving the eye candy accessible only to a small percentage of users.

"RTX always on" has become a thing

There's no escape anymore

Ray tracing makes a significant difference to the visuals, but it's often at the cost of a playable FPS. Nvidia's "RTX On" hashtag proudly celebrates every game that supports ray tracing, but most gamers play with "RTX Off" if they want a smooth gaming experience. In the last two years, however, we've had several high-profile games that have adopted ray tracing as the sole method of rendering visuals. Instead of creating a rasterized pipeline that works with optional ray tracing, which gamers can turn on or off, these titles are made with ray tracing from the ground up. This tanks performance on GPUs without dedicated RT cores, with some newer titles not even supported on such cards.

Examples like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Doom: The Dark Ages, Black Myth Wukong, and Star Wars Outlaws have not only put non-RT graphics cards on notice, but also affected older and lower-end GPUs that support ray tracing. Budget GPUs only have nominal ray tracing support, which is not practical for any real-world gaming. You're expected to keep RT effects off or to a minimum to get playable framerates. Older-gen GPUs like the RTX 2060 and RTX 3070 also struggle in titles where turning ray tracing off simply isn't possiblanymore. Having some form of always-on ray tracing in a game effectively makes these GPUs obsolete for modern games.

GPU hardware hasn't kept pace with time

We're seeing innovation in the wrong areas

You might believe that ray tracing was meant to eventually replace rasterization in games. However, even if that was the goal, graphics cards should have evolved enough to support the computational demands of the technology. While ray-traced games kept getting more demanding, GPUs failed to offer significant improvements to ray tracing performance. This meant that, realistically, ray tracing was limited to top-tier GPUs over the years. The story hasn't changed in 2026, and what makes it worse is that even flagship-grade GPUs rely on upscaling and frame generation to spit out decent framerates.

With game developers mandating ray-traced effects in newer titles, things have taken a turn for the worse. You no longer have the option to turn ray tracing off, even if you want to enjoy your high-end GPU's pure rasterized performance. For ray tracing to become a widely adopted technology, it needed GPU hardware to leapfrog system requirements generation after generation. However, the reverse came true, and we're now stuck in a situation where ray tracing is worth it only in a handful of games, considering the performance penalty. Whether you look at Nvidia or AMD GPUs, ray tracing performance is far from where it should have been after four generations of development.

VRAM woes aren't doing us any favors

Talk about a double whammy

Ray tracing requires not only powerful dedicated hardware, but also significant amounts of VRAM. With modern mainstream graphics cards still stuck between 8–12 GB of VRAM, smooth ray tracing performance becomes a challenge, especially at higher resolutions. The RTX 3070 in 2020 had 8GB of VRAM, which was a worrying sign of things to come. The $500 RTX 5070 in 2025 had 12GB of VRAM, which is still too low for a $550 graphics card. Modern ray-traced titles can exceed 12GB of VRAM at 1440p, and 4K ray tracing can often demand over 16GB of VRAM. Considering the $1,000 RTX 5080 packs only 16GB of VRAM, it's easy to see the massive VRAM problem hanging over gamers' heads.

Insufficient VRAM is a concern even without ray tracing, but turning it on compounds the problem. If you aren't getting enough raw hardware grunt as well as VRAM after paying over $1,000 for a GPU, what are you paying for? Is it just to turn the frame generation multiplier from 2x to 4x to 6x? The only GPUs that justify their prices when you look at the VRAM are the RX 9060 XT 16GB, RTX 5060 Ti 16GB, RX 9070, and RX 9070 XT, each of which sports 16GB of VRAM for $349, $429, $549, and $599, respectively. The catch is that none of them are particularly powerful ray tracing cards at higher resolutions.

Something needs to give, and soon

The unsustainable equation between modern GPU performance and ray tracing hardware demands can't go on forever. We either need a massive jump in GPU performance or radical optimization to make ray tracing easier on existing hardware. Upscaling and frame generation need to be seen as bonuses, not crutches to compensate for a lack of optimization. Ray tracing has merit in terms of immersion, but it can't trump the need for smooth performance or compatibility with older GPUs.