Ray tracing is a graphics technique that calculates light paths more realistically than older rendering methods. It can improve reflections, shadows, and bounced lighting, but it is one of the most demanding settings in modern games.
This applies to ray-tracing-capable PCs, NVIDIA RTX cards, AMD RX 6000-series and newer cards, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S in supported games.
Does this affect you?
Use this if a game advertises ray tracing and you want to know whether the visual improvement is worth the frame-rate cost.
What ray tracing actually does
Ray tracing is not just a filter. It is a different way of calculating light.
- It traces the paths of light rays as they bounce through a scene.
- Traditional rasterization uses fast approximations and prebuilt tricks for lighting.
- Ray-traced reflections can show the actual scene instead of a rough screen-space reflection.
- Ray-traced shadows can have softer, more realistic edges.
- Global illumination can let colored light bounce from surfaces onto nearby objects.
- Dedicated hardware helps ray tracing run fast enough for games.
The performance cost is high because real-time light simulation is much more expensive than older shortcuts.
Should you turn it on?
The answer depends on your hardware and the kind of game.
- High-end GPUs such as RTX 4070-class cards and above can often use ray tracing well, especially with upscaling.
- Mid-range or older GPUs may lose too much frame rate in demanding games.
- Competitive players usually turn ray tracing off to keep frame rates high and latency low.
- Story-driven and exploration games benefit more because atmosphere matters and reaction time is less critical.
- Console games often place ray tracing in Quality or Fidelity mode, while Performance mode reduces or disables it.
DLSS, FSR, and XeSS render at a lower internal resolution and upscale the image. Pairing ray tracing with upscaling is the standard way to recover performance.
Partial ray tracing and path tracing
Many games split ray tracing into reflections, shadows, ambient occlusion, and global illumination. Turning on only one or two effects can be a good compromise.
Path tracing, sometimes called full ray tracing, traces light more thoroughly. It can look excellent, but it is far more demanding and usually needs high-end hardware, upscaling, and often frame generation.
Sources
- NVIDIA – What Is Ray Tracing? (2025)
- AMD – Ray Tracing Technology Explained (2024)
- PlayStation Blog – Ray Tracing on PS5 Explained (2025)