What Is Ray Tracing? The Most Misunderstood Feature in PC Gaming

The Traditional Approach: Rasterization

For decades, game graphics have used rasterization — a technique that projects 3D geometry onto a 2D screen and applies lighting tricks (baked shadows, reflection probes, screen-space effects) to approximate how light behaves. It is fast but imprecise.

How Ray Tracing Works

Ray tracing simulates light physically. Rays are cast from the camera into the scene. When a ray hits a surface, new rays spawn — a shadow ray toward each light source, a reflection ray, a refraction ray through transparent surfaces. The color of each pixel is determined by the light that reaches it through these ray paths. This produces accurate reflections, soft shadows, global illumination, and accurate ambient occlusion that rasterization can only approximate.

The Performance Cost

Ray tracing is computationally expensive. A single frame requires millions of ray-surface intersection calculations. This is why NVIDIA introduced RT Cores in RTX 20 series GPUs — dedicated silicon for ray-triangle intersection math. Enabling ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p can cut frame rates in half on an RTX 3070. Path tracing (fully ray-traced lighting) can cut performance by 70–80%.

DLSS, FSR, and XeSS: The Answer to RT's Cost

NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR, and Intel XeSS use upscaling to restore the FPS lost to ray tracing. Render the game at a lower resolution, use AI or spatial algorithms to upscale to native, and the result looks close to native quality at much lower performance cost.

Is Ray Tracing Worth It?

For cinematic games at 60 FPS (RPGs, story games), ray tracing enhances the visual experience meaningfully. For competitive games at 144+ FPS, disable it and use the GPU budget for frame rate. The tradeoff is yours to make.