Ray Tracing in Games: What It Does and What It Costs

Updated 11 November 2026 · Standard formula, shown below

Ray tracing makes game lighting behave more like light in the real world by calculating how rays interact with surfaces, creating effects such as realistic reflections, shadows, and indirect light. Its cost is extra work for the graphics hardware: enabling it can reduce frame rates, require a more powerful GPU, and sometimes call for upscaling or other performance features.

What ray tracing changes

Traditional real-time games often use carefully designed approximations to simulate lighting. These techniques can look convincing and are efficient, but may need special rules for different surfaces or scenes. Ray tracing calculates selected paths of light through a scene, helping effects respond to objects and lighting in a more consistent way.

In a game, ray tracing may improve one or more of these:

Reflections: A ray-traced reflection can show objects outside the camera’s view, such as a character reflected in a mirror or buildings reflected in a shop window. Screen-space reflections, by contrast, generally use only information already visible on screen, so they can miss off-screen objects.
Shadows: Ray-traced shadows can reflect the shape and distance of objects more naturally, including softer edges where appropriate.
Global illumination: Light bouncing off one surface can contribute to the color and brightness of another. This can make a room lit by a colored sign, for example, appear more convincingly tinted.
Ambient occlusion and contact effects: Some implementations use rays to improve subtle shading where objects meet or sit close together.

A game does not necessarily ray trace every ray or every lighting effect. Developers choose which effects to trace, where to trace them, and how to combine them with conventional rendering. “Ray tracing on” therefore describes a range of implementations, not one fixed visual setting.

How it works in a game

In simplified terms, the renderer sends rays from the camera or from points associated with lighting and checks which scene surfaces those rays hit. The hit information helps determine what should appear in a reflection, where a shadow falls, or how light contributes to a surface. Real scenes would require an enormous number of calculations for a fully accurate simulation, so games use limited ray counts and shortcuts.

Modern graphics hardware can accelerate parts of this work with dedicated ray-tracing units, where available. The game still has to build and update scene data, shade the results, and combine them with the rest of the image. Noise-reduction methods and temporal information from earlier frames can help turn a small number of rays into a cleaner-looking result. This is why ray tracing can involve more than simply “switching on” a hardware feature.

Some games also use path tracing, a more comprehensive approach that follows light bouncing through the scene. It can produce unified lighting, shadows, and reflections, but is usually much more demanding than tracing only selected effects. The terms are related, but a game advertising ray tracing is not necessarily path traced.

What it costs in performance

The immediate cost is usually lower performance: fewer frames per second, more demanding frame times, or both. The size of the hit varies with the game, the effects enabled, scene complexity, resolution, graphics settings, and hardware. There is no reliable universal percentage to apply to every title.

Higher resolutions generally mean more pixels to render, while more extensive ray-traced effects mean more work per frame. A game may offer separate controls for reflections, shadows, and global illumination, allowing you to keep the effect that matters most and turn down the others. Ray tracing can also increase memory or processing demands, though the exact impact depends on the implementation and hardware.

Upscaling can reduce the workload by rendering internally at a lower resolution and reconstructing a higher-resolution image. Frame generation, where supported, can display additional generated frames, but it does not make the underlying game simulation run faster and may not improve input responsiveness in the same way as a higher native frame rate. These features are options with trade-offs, not cost-free fixes.

What you need to use it

Check the specific game’s requirements and graphics settings. Hardware support, driver support, and the game’s own implementation all matter; a compatible graphics card does not guarantee that every game supports ray tracing or that the experience will be smooth at your preferred settings.

Confirm that the game offers the ray-tracing effect you want and supports your system’s graphics hardware.
Check the game’s recommended requirements, not just its minimum requirements, especially for the resolution and frame rate you target.
Make sure the game and graphics driver are up to date if an option is missing or behaving unexpectedly.
Consider the whole system: the GPU is often the main constraint for ray tracing, but the processor, memory, cooling, and power supply can also affect a gaming PC’s performance and stability.

On consoles, the developer sets the available modes and their trade-offs. A game may offer a ray-tracing mode, a higher-frame-rate mode, or a balanced option, and the exact choices differ by title. On a PC, there are often more settings to adjust, but more tuning may be needed.

Ray tracing versus traditional graphics

Rasterization, the traditional basis of real-time graphics, projects geometry onto the screen and efficiently determines what is visible. It can produce excellent images with techniques such as baked lighting, shadow maps, reflection probes, and screen-space effects. These methods remain common because they can deliver strong visual quality at lower computational cost.

Ray tracing is not automatically better in every scene. A carefully authored rasterized effect can look cleaner or more intentional than a noisy or poorly tuned ray-traced one. Conversely, tracing can handle certain changing reflections and light interactions without requiring an artist to create a separate approximation for every situation. Many games combine both approaches: rasterization does much of the rendering, while rays improve selected effects.

Nor does ray tracing mean a game is “realistic” overall. Art direction, materials, animation, resolution, and other rendering choices remain important. The feature describes a lighting technique, not a guarantee about the whole image.

How to choose settings

Start with the result you value most: image quality, smooth motion, or a balance. If the game has a built-in benchmark or frame-rate display, compare the same scene with the effect on and off. Test during demanding gameplay as well as in a quiet area; performance can vary substantially between scenes.

For competitive or fast-moving games, prioritize stable frame times and a responsive frame rate; ray tracing may be a poor trade if it makes motion less consistent.
For slower, visually focused games, try reflections or global illumination first, then decide whether the improvement justifies the performance cost.
If performance drops, lower the ray-tracing quality or disable individual effects before reducing every graphics setting.
Compare images at your normal viewing distance. Small differences in still screenshots may matter less during play than smooth, steady motion.

Keep the display’s native resolution and your frame-rate target in mind. A setting that feels worthwhile at one resolution or on one display may not be worthwhile on another. There is no requirement to enable ray tracing just because a game supports it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does ray tracing make games look better?
It can improve particular reflections, shadows, or lighting, but the result depends on the game and settings. It may be subtle, and a well-made non-ray-traced effect can sometimes look just as good or better.

Does ray tracing lower FPS?
Often, yes, because it adds graphics work. The performance change depends on the game, the effects used, resolution, hardware, and other settings; test the specific game rather than relying on a general estimate.

Is ray tracing the same as path tracing?
No. Ray tracing is a broad technique that games can apply to selected effects. Path tracing follows light more comprehensively through a scene and is generally more demanding.

Can I use ray tracing without a dedicated ray-tracing GPU?
Support and performance depend on the graphics hardware, software, and game. Some implementations may run through other processing paths, but that does not guarantee usable performance. Check the game’s requirements and test it on your system.

Should I turn ray tracing on or off?
Turn it on if you like the visual difference and performance remains acceptable. Turn it down or off if it causes stuttering, lowers frame rates below your target, or makes little visible difference to you.

Method: the standard formula for this calculation, rounded as each result states. See how the calculators work or report an error.