Ray Tracing
A rendering technique that simulates how light physically behaves — bouncing, reflecting, and refracting — to produce photorealistic lighting, shadows, and reflections in games.
What is ray tracing?
Ray tracing is a rendering technique that simulates the physical behavior of light. Instead of using shortcuts (like shadow maps and screen-space reflections), ray tracing traces individual rays of light as they bounce between surfaces — just like light works in the real world.
The result is dramatically more realistic lighting: accurate reflections on any surface, soft shadows that change with distance, global illumination where light bounces between objects, and correct refraction through glass and water. Path tracing — the most advanced form — traces every light interaction, producing near-cinematic quality.
Performance cost and hardware
Ray tracing is computationally expensive. Tracing millions of light rays per frame requires dedicated hardware — RT cores on NVIDIA GPUs, Ray Accelerators on AMD. Without these, ray tracing runs in software and is far too slow for real-time use.
Even with dedicated hardware, enabling ray tracing typically reduces FPS by 30-60%. This is why AI upscaling (DLSS, FSR) is critical — it recovers the lost performance by rendering at a lower internal resolution and reconstructing detail with AI.
In 2026, NVIDIA Blackwell (RTX 50 series) offers the best ray tracing performance. AMD's RDNA 4 doubled its RT performance versus RDNA 3, making it genuinely competitive for the first time.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is ray tracing worth the FPS drop?
It depends on the game. In titles with heavy RT implementation (Cyberpunk 2077, Alan Wake 2), the visual improvement is dramatic. In games with basic RT reflections, the difference is subtle. With DLSS/FSR, you can often enable RT with minimal net FPS loss.
Can AMD GPUs do ray tracing?
Yes. AMD RDNA 4 GPUs (RX 9070 series) have dedicated ray accelerators and deliver competitive RT performance. RDNA 3 was noticeably behind NVIDIA, but RDNA 4 closed much of the gap.