When Nvidia first showcased ray tracing alongside the RTX 20-series all the way back in 2018, it felt like a generational leap for gaming. The demos made it seem like the next best thing to photorealism, with ray-traced reflections, shadows, and global illumination behaving in ways rasterization simply couldn't match, no matter how good its approximations were. It was so important for Nvidia that it rebranded the "GeForce GTX" moniker to "GeForce RTX," signaling a fundamental shift in how games would be rendered moving forward.

However, when ray-traced games started coming out, people quickly realized it wasn't worth the performance hit. Enabling ray tracing meant dropping the resolution to make AAA titles playable even on a flagship card like the RTX 2080 Ti. Back then, we hoped the performance would get better with newer cards, and it certainly did in many ways. But fast-forward to 2026, and we're still relying heavily on upscaling (and even frame generation) to make ray tracing viable in modern AAA games.

The performance hit has always been inevitable

Even today, the FPS hit from ray tracing is impossible to ignore

I always knew ray tracing was never going to be cheap, but I assumed that as newer GPUs arrived with more RT cores, performance would scale in a way that made the feature feel increasingly effortless. That expectation wasn't unreasonable. Dedicated hardware exists precisely to accelerate specialized workloads, and Nvidia made a big deal out of RT cores when Turing launched in 2018. The underlying promise was clear: early ray tracing might be demanding, but future architectures would steadily shrink the performance penalty.

While performance did improve over the past several years, the cost never truly disappeared because ray tracing workloads kept evolving as more powerful GPUs like the RTX 3090 and 4090 came out. Developers kept pushing for higher ray counts, more advanced global illumination, and even path tracing, which remains incredibly taxing even on a flagship GPU like the RTX 5090 today. And let's not forget that many people chasing visuals are trying to game at 4K, not 1440p. All these factors have kept the FPS penalty firmly intact despite significant hardware improvements.

Upscaling evolved faster than ray tracing

Developers now lean on DLSS and FSR more than ever

Both DLSS and FSR have come a long way since their early implementations. I remember trying DLSS 1.0 in Battlefield V when it first came out in 2019, and it looked like a blurry mess. It looked nowhere near native resolution, as fine detail took a noticeable hit, and if anything, DLSS felt less like innovation and more like a crutch to make ray tracing playable. Fast-forward to 2026, and DLSS 4 looks almost identical to native 4K in most scenarios. Even FSR has caught up quickly since its introduction in 2021, with FSR 4 now offering image quality slightly better than DLSS 3.

Sure, these improvements have made ray tracing far more viable than it was a few years ago, but they've also changed how much time developers spend on optimization. When DLSS and FSR can significantly improve frame rates, especially now with frame generation on top of upscaling, there's less pressure on developers to relentlessly optimize for native resolution. In fact, it allows them to push heavier effects, knowing very well that most gamers would enable upscaling to offset the performance cost, anyway. What used to be a fallback option now feels like an expected part of the experience.

Ray tracing's visual gains justify the FPS hit

But only as long as you have DLSS or FSR enabled

There's a reason why AAA developers continue to push ray tracing in their newer titles despite all the hardware demands. When implemented properly, the visual upgrade can be genuinely impressive. Cyberpunk 2077's path tracing is a perfect example of that because it's not just ray-traced reflections, shadows, or global illumination layered onto a rasterized image. It's a far more comprehensive lighting technique that completely changes how the entire scene behaves. It's the kind of upgrade that makes you stop and just stare at the lighting for a minute.

But as you probably know, that level of ray tracing implementation is brutally expensive from a performance standpoint. Even with an RTX 5090, Cyberpunk 2077 with path tracing enabled averages around 30FPS. That means you absolutely have to rely on DLSS upscaling and frame generation for a smooth experience. Even in other titles with lighter ray tracing effects, the FPS hit remains significant enough that DLSS or FSR feels more like a necessity. Most gamers aren't thinking about how much better the game looks when the FPS drops from 100 to 60, but how much less responsive and smooth the game suddenly feels.

Upscaling matters more than ray tracing for most gamers

I believe upscaling will continue to overshadow ray tracing, not because the latter failed to deliver visual improvements, but because reconstruction techniques solved a more immediate problem. DLSS and FSR directly address performance constraints that affect almost everyone, regardless of whether ray tracing is enabled or not. Higher frame rates and better responsiveness are things you notice every second you move around in a game, while ray tracing's improvements are often scene-dependent. Until GPUs get powerful enough to a point where ray tracing's FPS hit doesn't matter, upscaling (and frame generation) will remain unavoidable.