What is ray tracing in gaming and does it really make a difference?
Games look way more beautiful, but it comes at a high cost.
One of the main selling points of the current console generation is that Sony and Microsoft's machines can finally handle ray tracing (RT) at a decent level. Yet while the PS5 and Xbox Series X can provide moderate ray-traced experiences, the top end of the PC gaming food chain is on an entirely different level. High-end rigs offer the most advanced RT features with incredible fidelity. But what if you're on an aging or average PC? Is ray tracing really worth enabling?
It all comes down to the hardware you're using. If your GPU is more than five years old, any ray-traced games your PC is capable of running will likely perform poorly. Ray tracing is a luxury gaming feature that should only be turned on if you own a fairly high-end rig. And that's not even mentioning its flashier sibling: path tracing.
Is ray tracing worth it?
For your average PC gamer playing on a middling GPU, ray tracing will cost too many frames to make it worth enabling. That said, at time of writing, the Steam Hardware Survey ranks the extremely capable NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards with the highest usage share. We thus see dedicated PC players are embracing graphics cards more than capable of handling ray tracing. If your GPU is a couple of generations old, though, RT should be disabled.
But what is ray tracing exactly? In short, it's an advanced rendering technique that simulates realistic lighting effects, shadows and reflections more accurately than old-school rasterization methods. In older games that don't support ray tracing, screen-space reflections are used, which aren't very accurate. By contrast, modern titles that support RT can reflect offscreen objects and shadows by bouncing rays around the screen, before accurately calculating how the in-game world should be lit.
There are a couple of major caveats to consider. High-end hardware users often embrace upscaling and frame generation technologies to boost frame rates, though this can come at the admitted cost of increased input lag.
For folks gaming on older or mid-range graphics cards, there's no way to recommend ray tracing. Instead, focus on locking down a stable frame rate at your monitor's native resolution. After all, if you've never seen ray tracing in action, you're not going to miss it.
How much does ray tracing impact FPS?
A whole lot, is the succinct answer. Though it depends on the specific game you're booting up, performance in many modern AAA PC titles will often plummet once you enable ray tracing features, unless you're rocking a seriously powerful rig. You can improve your fps for smoother gaming by turning on upscaling or embracing frame generation, sure. Yet if you're not into frame rate-boosting tech, ray tracing can be a performance killer.
Analysis of the impact of ray tracing across various games shows that average FPS drops significantly when RT is active. That's a whole lot of frames to sacrifice for a fancy lighting technique many folks will struggle to notice in motion.
Some titles see massive dips in frame rates, with demanding games experiencing decreases of 45 to 65 percent. While geometrically correct rays bouncing off surfaces look impressive, that represents a brutal performance hit.
Ray tracing vs. path tracing: what's the difference?
If ray tracing is a talented apprentice, path tracing is a full-blown master. Path tracing is still a type of RT, but a more advanced one. In the handful of PC games that deploy this incredibly pretty technique, the results are often jaw-dropping.
Path tracing, sometimes referred to as full ray tracing in certain titles, can calculate far more lighting sources than traditional RT. In games that don't support path tracing, RT is often combined with traditional rasterization methods, with ray tracing handling specific effects like reflections or shadows. Path tracing works differently by controlling the entire look of a game, leading to a more consistently lit image.
Comparing high ray tracing presets to full path tracing options reveals subtle but distinct improvements in lighting fidelity, though differences can be difficult to spot on smaller mobile screens.
Path tracing's multi-bounce global illumination is most clearly seen in advanced lighting interactions, such as colored light bleeding from nearby off-screen light sources and more effective specular reflections on windshields with reduced aliasing compared to standard RT.
As impressive as path tracing is in modern titles, it is even more brutally taxing on frame rates than traditional ray tracing. Unless you own a top-tier graphics card, you're best off steering well clear of the gorgeous but performance-punishing tech.
