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What Is Ray Tracing in Gaming?
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Ray tracing is the biggest change in game graphics in twenty years, and it is also the most expensive thing you can turn on. Both of those are true at once, which is why the advice around it is so muddled.
This guide covers what it actually is, what it costs you in frames, which games do it well, and when it is worth having.
What ray tracing is
Games have always faked lighting. A developer places a light, decides roughly how bright things near it should be, and paints in shadows and reflections by hand. It works, and for decades it was the only option, but it means the lighting is a guess that was made before you ever played the game.
Ray tracing does not guess. It follows individual rays of light around the scene, working out what they hit, what bounces off, what gets absorbed and what colour they pick up along the way. It is how film and television visual effects have been made for years. The difference is that a film can spend hours rendering a single frame, and a game has about eight milliseconds.
That is the whole story. Same physics, no time to do it.
What it actually changes
Three things, and they are worth separating because games often use one without the others.
Reflections. The most obvious one. Without ray tracing, a reflection in a puddle or a window is either a pre-baked approximation or a cheap trick that only shows what is already on screen. With it, reflections show what is genuinely there, including things behind you.
Shadows. Softer and more accurate, particularly where several light sources overlap. Traditional shadows have hard edges and often simply do not appear where a light source is small or indirect.
Global illumination. The subtle one and the one that changes a scene most. Light bouncing off a red wall tints the room red. Sunlight coming through a window lights the whole space rather than a patch on the floor. It is rarely something you notice directly, and it is the reason a ray-traced scene looks like a photograph and a traditional one looks like a game.
What it costs
This is the part most guides skip, and it is the part that decides whether you should turn it on.
Ray tracing is expensive. Turning it on in a demanding game can cost you a substantial share of your frame rate, and the more of it a game uses, the steeper the cost. Reflections alone are manageable. Full ray-traced lighting is not, on most hardware.
Which is why the graphics card matters more here than anywhere else. Cards without dedicated ray tracing hardware will technically run it and will not enjoy the experience. The RTX cards have that hardware, AMD's RDNA 2 and later do too, and the gap between them and older cards is enormous once you turn it on.
The practical floor is a current-generation card with at least 8GB of video memory. Ray tracing is memory-hungry as well as demanding, and running out of VRAM produces stutter rather than a lower frame rate, which is far more unpleasant.
Upscaling is what makes it viable
Ray tracing on its own would still be a curiosity. What made it practical is upscaling.
The idea is straightforward. Render the game at a lower resolution, then use the graphics card to reconstruct a higher resolution image from it. You get most of the visual quality for a fraction of the work, and you spend the savings on ray tracing.
NVIDIA's version is DLSS, AMD's is FSR, and Intel's is XeSS. Newer versions also generate additional frames rather than just upscaling existing ones, which increases the frame rate further.
In practice almost nobody runs ray tracing without upscaling, and the two should be thought of as a pair rather than separate settings. We have covered how it works in our guide to what DLSS is.
Path tracing: the current top end
Path tracing is ray tracing without the shortcuts. Rather than tracing rays for specific effects like reflections or shadows, it traces the whole lighting model, which is much closer to how films are rendered.
It looks remarkable and it is punishing. Only a handful of games offer it, and it needs a high-end current-generation card plus upscaling to be playable at all.
Cyberpunk 2077 is the showcase, and it is genuinely the best-looking game on PC with it enabled. Black Myth: Wukong is the other one worth seeing.
Which games are worth turning it on for
Not all of them, and this is where the honest answer saves you money.
Worth it: Cyberpunk 2077, where Night City at night is a different game with it on. Hogwarts Legacy, where the castle interiors are lit almost entirely by candles and fireplaces and it shows. Black Myth: Wukong, which was built around it.
Nice to have: Diablo IV added ray tracing after launch and it improves the atmosphere without transforming it. Plenty of games sit here.
Leave it off: every competitive shooter. Valorant, Apex Legends, Warzone. You are trading frames for looks in games where frames are the point, and competitive players turn settings down rather than up.
The interesting exception: Elden Ring supports ray tracing but caps at 60 frames per second regardless of your hardware. That changes the maths entirely. There is no point chasing frames the game will not draw, so if you can hold 60 with it on, turn it on.
Is it worth it?
If you play single-player games and you care how they look, yes, and the difference in the games that do it well is not subtle.
If you play competitive shooters, no. You will turn it off within a week.
If you are choosing between a card that does ray tracing well and one that is faster without it, be honest about which games you actually play. Buying for the three titles that showcase it while spending most of your time in something else is a common and expensive mistake.
What you need
A current-generation graphics card with dedicated ray tracing hardware and at least 8GB of video memory for 1080p. More VRAM as you go up in resolution, and 16GB is the comfortable number at 1440p and above with ray tracing enabled.
The processor matters less here than almost anywhere else, since ray tracing runs on the graphics card. If your frame rate is poor with ray tracing off, that is a different problem, and our guide to the best CPU for gaming covers it.
Final Thoughts
Ray tracing is real, it is not marketing, and in the right game it is the biggest visual upgrade available. It is also the single most expensive setting in any game, and it is worth nothing at all in the games where frame rate decides the outcome.
Buy for what you play. If that is Cyberpunk and Hogwarts Legacy, spend on the graphics card. If it is Valorant and Apex, do not.
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