We’ve all heard of the word ‘ray tracing’ as GPU manufacturers rave about their latest models and their ability to render your gaming worlds in stunning realistic quality. But is ray tracing actually worth it?
In this blog post, we’re taking a closer look at ray tracing, detailing what it is, what hardware you need, how it can improve performance, and finally, whether it’s worth it for gaming.
What is Ray Tracing?
Ray tracing is a specialised rendering technique which simulates the way in which light behaves in the real world. It intelligently takes the point of view of the camera, looks at the image, and then traces it back to the original light source, taking into account any extra textures to create life-like shadows.
Whilst ray tracing can be physically demanding on your PC hardware, especially your graphics card, it does allow you to view your favourite gaming worlds in a whole new light. Literally…
How Does Ray Tracing Improve Gaming?
Lighting can make or break your in-game immersion. Limited detail, poor visibility, and pixelated images are all things that severely impact how we view our favourite gaming worlds. Ray tracing virtually eliminates this. By introducing lifelike lighting and shadows, your game environments look more realistic and help to emulate the way in which objects interact with light in the real-world.
Both of which help to further immerse you in these virtual worlds, creating vibrant and detailed landscapes that are sure to draw you in.
What Games Support Ray Tracing?
More AAA titles are shipping with support for ray tracing. We’ve rounded up some of our faves that support this innovative tech.
- Alan Wake 2
- Portal
- Ghostwire: Tokyo
- Resident Evil Village
- Elden Ring
- Returnal
If you’re looking for even more ray tracing compatible games, we’ve rounded up five more in our dedicated blog post. Take a look!
What Hardware Do You Need for Ray Tracing?
To utilise ray tracing, you’ll need to ensure your gaming PC meets the minimum requirements. We’ve listed these below.
| Minimum |
|---|
| Dedicated GPU with ray tracing hardware – NVIDIA RTX 20 Series or higher / AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series or higher |
| At least 8GB RAM |
| Intel Core i5 CPU or equivalent |
So… Is Ray Tracing Worth It?
Now for the real reason you’re reading this blog post – is ray tracing worth it?
Ray tracing delivers stunning graphics, adding realistic touches to your favourite games to emulate the real world and immerse you further in these virtual worlds. Not only does ray tracing enhance the environment, but it can also add visual effects to characters.
Picture a warrior carrying a sword, dressed in luxurious metal armour to protect him from enemies. The natural light bounces off the metal to create dramatic shadows for that extra touch to make your games look *chef’s kiss*.
Whilst there’s no denying that ray tracing delivers serious visuals, allowing you to view your favourite gaming like never before. But unless you have a GPU that can keep up with this, you might see a notable drop in your performance. Poor frame rates and unwanted display stutter are sure to break up your in-game immersion, delivering the opposite of what ray tracing is supposed to achieve.
What’s more, ray tracing isn’t always super obvious. Sometimes it takes seeing a dramatic side-by-side comparison to truly see the difference ray tracing can have. This begs the question, if you can’t see it straight away, is it worth it?
Ultimately, there’s no right or wrong answer to this question.
Ray tracing is an attractive feature for many gamers, especially those who want to truly get the most out of their hardware and experience their favourite games in a whole new light. However, it’s not essential. Those whose PCs can’t meet the power demands or perhaps those who don’t want the performance drop aren’t missing out on too much. Ray tracing is purely about visuals, so if that isn’t your priority, it’s not worth it for you.
If you’re still struggling to decide if ray tracing is worth it for you, we’ve rounded up all the pros and cons below.
Pros and Cons of Ray Tracing
Pros
- Improved realism
- Enhanced in-game immersion
Cons
- Can be extremely taxing on PC hardware
- Requires specific hardware such as a dedicated graphics card with ray tracing cores
- More power-hungry, increasing the overall power consumption of your PC
- May potentially impact frame rates due to the stress on your other components
In Need of an Upgrade?
Have you decided that ray tracing is for you, but don’t have the hardware to power this tech? At Overclockers UK, we stock plenty of premium compatible GPUs to render your games in lifelike quality. However, if building your own computer isn’t quite your thing, you can also find plenty of pre-built and configurable PCs with all the hardware you need!
MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super Ventus 2x OC 16GB GDDR6X Graphics Card
- RTX 40 Series
- Ada Lovelace architecture
- Third-gen RT cores
- 8448 CUDA cores
- 16GB GDDR6X video memory
- All white design
Sapphire Radeon RX 7800 XT Pulse 16GB GDDR6 Graphics Card
- Radeon RX 7000 Series
- RDNA 3 architecture
- 60 ray tracing cores
- 3840 shader units
- 16GB DDR6X video memory
OcUK Gaming Scimitar Configurable PC
- Configurable gaming PC
- Customisable base hardware spec to suit you
- AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D CPU and NVIDIA RTX 4080 Super
- 32GB DDR5 RAM
- Optional secondary storage drive
- Windows 11 Home included
OcUK Gaming Eagle Configurable PC
- Configurable gaming PC
- Adjustable PC hardware to suit a range of styles
- Intel Core i9 14900KF CPU and AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX
- 32GB DDR5 RAM
- Optional secondary storage drive
- Windows 11 Home included
Learn More About Your PC Hardware
Is Ray Tracing Worth It for You?
Do you think ray tracing is worth it? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
*Prices correct at time of writing and PC specs are subject to change.
- 6 min read
Ruth Rowley
Author
Ruth has been with Overclockers UK for over a year and has gone on to write about everything ranging from in-depth hardware guides to monthly game releases.
Outside of writing blog posts, she can be found wrapped in a blanket with her black cat, engrossed in a book or playing life-simulation games such as The Sims, Stardew Valley, and Animal Crossing.
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I nearly consider ray tracing to be a scam. It’s just that I don’t believe it actually improves visuals much at all. Often when I’ve tested the game with and without it I cannot tell the difference. And I remember that early on when it was first being introduced everyone was focusing on reflections, which have always been something that could be done without ray tracing.
Now we’ve come to the point where every time a game is shown with and without it it looks completely different, and it’s clear that the lighting isn’t even being handled in the same way. With ray tracing the game is often brighter and everyone says it looks better, but the truth is it’s just different lighting that could have been achieved without it. I remember this happened with the ray tracing mod for Half-Life 2. But it also happened with the last Metro game.
And the thing is, nvidia graphics cards are supposed to have all of that special hardware just for Ray tracing right? So why is it that enabling a ray tracing always slows the frame rate down? If it’s using extra dedicated hardware then it seems like it should be possible to enable ray tracing without such a massive performance hit, or perhaps without any performance degradation at all. But for some reason that doesn’t happen, almost as if it isn’t actually working that way at all. If on the other hand the special ray tracing hardware simply was inadequate, but then why don’t you see the power consumption decrease as most of the card will be less utilized? Gaming journalism is unwilling to ask this question because they’re unwilling to offend an industry titan, but there is something fishy going on. Kind of like the way that ray tracing was supposed to be this big deal and then after several years path tracing came out and everyone admitted that that was real ray tracing and what was going on before wasn’t. Funny how no one was willing to admit that before.
In any case I am convinced that if you gave people on the labeled comparison images comparing the ray traced and purely rest or rendered versions of a scene in a game in a game that didn’t simply strip off effects like reflections that could be achieved with raster rendering and instead limit them to the ray traced version, people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference and they would realize that ray tracing is vastly over hyped. It was a next big thing that Nvidia used to hype up a generation of video cards that they had failed to make meaningful performance improvements on, and I really think it’s about time we wake up on this. Nearly everything you think of as a ray tracing effect can be achieved without it with far less of a performance hit even though you’re supposedly have all of that dedicated ray tracing hardware.
My graphics degree won’t let me agree with a single thing this other guy said in the comments.
Ray tracing has been around for decades in pre-rendered situations. The fact that we’re able to do it in real time at all is amazing.
There’s always been haters for every advancement. When we went to 1080p, people freaked out. When anti-aliasing happened, people freaked out. When 4K happened, people freaked out. Now, the same thing is happening with ray tracing.
Everything takes graphical power. Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean it’s a scam. If you don’t like it, turn it off and stop bitching about it.