What is Ray Tracing in the game and does it really make a difference?
The games look much better, but that comes at a high cost.
One of the biggest selling points of the current generation of consoles is that Sony and Microsoft’s machines can finally handle ray tracing (RT) at a decent level. Yet while the PS5 and Xbox Series High-end platforms deliver 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 depends on the hardware you use. If your GPU is more than five years old, any ray tracing games your PC is capable of running will likely perform poorly. Ray tracing is a luxury gaming feature that should only be enabled if you have a fairly high-end rig. And that’s not even talking about its flashier sibling: path tracing.
Is ray tracing worth it?
For your average PC gamer playing on a mid-range GPU, ray tracing will cost too many frames to make it worth enabling. That said, at the time of writing, the Steam Hardware Survey ranks the extremely capable NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 as the graphics card with the highest usage share. So we’re seeing dedicated PC players adopt graphics cards that are more than capable of handling ray tracing. If your GPU is multiple generations old, RT should be disabled.
But what exactly is ray tracing? In short, it is an advanced rendering technique that simulates realistic lighting effects, shadows, and highlights more accurately than old-fashioned rasterization methods. In older games that do not support ray tracing, reflections in screen space are used, which are not very accurate. In contrast, modern titles supporting RT can reflect objects and shadows off-screen by bouncing rays off the screen, before precisely calculating how the game world should be lit.
I’ve been enjoying ray tracing in some of the best PC games for years and I love the technology. There are some major caveats, however. I’m lucky enough to have access to an RTX 5090, and I often don’t mind adopting NVIDIA’s DLSS 4.5 Multi Frame Generation technology to increase my frame rates (at the admitted cost of increased input lag).
For people gaming on an RTX 3060 or AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT, I cannot recommend ray tracing in any way. Instead, focus on locking a stable frame rate at your monitor’s native resolution. After all, if you’ve never seen ray tracing in action, you won’t miss it.
How does ray tracing impact FPS?
“A lot” is the short answer. Although it depends on the specific game you’re starting, the performance of many modern AAA PC titles will often drop once you enable ray tracing features, unless you’re using a very powerful rig. You can improve your fps for smoother gameplay by enabling DLSS or adopting frame generation, of course. Still, if you don’t like AI technology that increases frame rate, ray tracing can hurt performance.
Some time ago, TechSpot analyzed the impact of ray tracing on 36 different games. In full site testing, average FPS dropped 20-40% when RT was enabled. That’s a lot of frames to sacrifice for a fancy lighting technique that many people will have trouble noticing in motion.
Some of the worst offenders, according to the report: Hogwarts Legacy saw a 45 percent drop in frame rates; For Alan wakes up 2 the decrease is about 52 percent, and Hitman 3The average frame rate drops an absurd 65 percent. I played Agent 47’s latest assassination adventure with RT cranked to the max, and as much as I admire all those geometrically correct rays bouncing off the chrome-domed killer’s head, it’s a brutal success in terms of performance.
Ray tracing vs path tracing: what is the difference?
Let me indulge in some cheesiness Star Wars analogy: if ray tracing is a talented Padawan, path tracing is a Jedi master in his own right. Path tracing is still a type of RT, but more advanced. In the handful of PC games that deploy this incredibly pretty technique, the results are often stunning.
Path tracing – sometimes called “full ray tracing” in some titles – can calculate many more lighting sources than traditional RT. In games that do not support path tracing, RT is often combined with traditional rasterization methods, with ray tracing handling specific effects such as reflections or shadows. Path tracing works differently. Compared to standard RT, it typically controls the entire look of a game, leading to a more consistently lit image.
I replayed the opening scene of Resident Evil Requiem for this feature and compared its high ray tracing preset to the full path tracing option (as you can see in the screenshot above). If you’re reading this on your phone, you probably won’t be able to spot the differences between the two technologies. But they definitely exist.
Path Tracing’s multi-bounce global illumination is most clearly visible in the car’s left headlight. Note the slight red tint cast by the neon lights of a nearby storefront, off-screen. This is absent with ray tracing, where bounce lighting is more limited. If you squint, you can also see that path tracing handles specular reflections on the car windshield more effectively, presenting less aliasing compared to standard RT. Trust me, it’s much easier to tell the difference when looking at an uncompressed 4K image.
As much as I admire the layout of paths like 007: First Light And Cyberpunk 2077it’s even more brutally taxing on frame rates than traditional ray tracing. With the latter title, enabling path tracing can be 50% more demanding than RT depending on the scene. Unless you are lucky enough to own an RTX 5090 or an RTX 5080, it is best to avoid this magnificent but performance-challenging technology.
