For several years now, ray-tracing has been viewed as an unnecessary graphics feature that's more responsible for tanking your PC's performance rather than providing a better gaming experience. And to a degree, gamers are right about that. Running a game with ray-tracing enabled will absolutely come at a high performance cost, depending on the quality of ray-tracing and how prevalent ray-traced lighting is in the game itself.

But despite the performance hit, ray-tracing is absolutely worth the increased resource demands on your GPU. Sure, your frame ates will drop by enabling it, but the benefits of improved lighting make it clear that this time, gamers were wrong.

What is ray-tracing and why does it matter?

A brief history of the RT platform

Ray-tracing first entered the mainstream game development space in 2018 when Nvidia debuted the RTX 20-series graphics cards. The defining feature of these new GPUs was their support for ray-traced lighting, which offered more realistic lighting in 3D environments. Ray tracing effectively simulates how light would behave within a 3D environment by tracing paths that light rays would take as they bounce around a particular scene. Rays are sent from the camera and evaluated to determine which surfaces they hit and how those surfaces should be lit based on nearby light sources. If an object blocks the path between a surface and a light source, a shadow is cast.

This approach is far more accurate than traditional rasterization techniques, which project 3D objects onto a 2D screen by filling in pixels. While rasterized lighting is faster for a GPU to process, it isn't nearly as realistic as ray-traced lighting effects, particularly when dealing with reflections and shadows. Enabling ray-tracing in a game is most obvious when looking at reflections and shadows or the scattering of light through fog in what we call volumetric fog. This offers better, more realistic graphics and increased immersion, and offers potential for new gameplay mechanics using ray-traced reflections that can allow you to see details that would otherwise be occluded with the standard line of sight. Hitman 3 almost mastered that last bit, though it came at a high cost.

It can also just make your game more playable by providing a better lighting system that makes it easier to see what's actually happening on screen. One of the clearest examples of ray-traced graphics providing a more usable visual experience is Doom: The Dark Ages. Not only does Doom look better with ray-tracing enabled, but certain levels are also nearly unplayable without ray-tracing. For me and many others, Dragon's Dogma 2 is also vastly improved with ray-traced features enabled.

Ray-tracing does come with a serious performance hit

Gamers weren't wrong about that

Because ray-tracing uses a more realistic model for in-game lighting, it can tax your GPU much more than running the same game without ray-traced lighting enabled. Turning on ray-tracing tends to drop your GPU performance by 30–50% depending on the game and which parts of the ray tracing stack are enabled. As well as ray tracing shadows and reflections, there's also full ray tracing global illumination and path tracing, both of which can really tax your system. Things have gotten a bit better with newer GPUs that can offset the ray-tracing overhead with AI-powered supersampling and frame-generation features, but for older GPUs, ray-tracing often tanks your frame rates through the floor.

This is particularly obvious when playing around with game settings in Cyberpunk 2077 or Black Myth: Wukong, but many of the latest game titles are so very taxing on gaming rigs because of advanced ray-tracing features to improve the graphics. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Alan Wake 2, and Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition are all notoriously taxing games that leverage quite a bit of ray-tracing to provide better, more realistic graphics.

Because of the large overhead needed to utilize ray-traced lighting, most gamers opt to shut down specific ray tracing features and path tracing in games to speed up frame-rates and provide a smoother gaming experience, the latter of which can provide significant gains to performance.

The ray-tracing hate misses the point

Gaming doesn't have to be about your FPS meter

Ultimately, ray-tracing makes your games look better. You can see more because you've got better lighting, and you get better immersion with better quality visuals. Plus, if you need a reason to embrace frame generation, using AI to generate additional frames to smooth out performance can get you the benefits of ray-tracing with fewer downsides.

But even if you refuse frame-gen and take the raw performance hit, ray tracing can be worth enabling on hardware that can handle it, especially in visually-driven games. Not only does it provide better lighting, more realistic shadows, and stunning reflections, it's more immersive and might solve other game-related issues like poor light balance. In fact, these days even integrated GPUs have ray-tracing support (though performance isn't quite there) and some games have managed to implement ray-tracing in a way that doesn't come at as much of a frame-rate cost. Dragon's Dogma 2 looks much better with ray-tracing enabled, and it doesn't tank performance as much as other heavy RT titles.

Other games like Cyberpunk 2077, Ghost Wire: Tokyo, and Control are still too heavily ray-traced to play smoothly on all GPUs without frame-generation or super-resolution assistance, but they just look so much better with ray-tracing enabled. And ultimately, PC gaming isn't just about how fast your PC can display frames or how stable your overclock is. It's about enjoying games. So go ahead, and turn those ray-traced volumetric lighting effects back on.