Ray Tracing Explained — What It Does and Is It Worth Turning On?

Ray tracing is the one graphics setting that gets marketed harder than any other, and the one that tanks frame rates harder than any other. So what does it actually do, and should you turn it on? Here's the honest version, in plain English.

Rasterization vs Ray Tracing

Every game you've played for the last 25 years uses rasterization: the GPU projects 3D geometry onto your screen, then paints lighting on top using clever tricks — pre-baked shadow maps, cube maps for reflections, artist-placed fake lights. It's fast, and skilled developers make it look incredible. But the tricks have limits. A rasterized mirror can't reflect anything that's off-screen. A pre-baked shadow can't react when you knock over a lamp.

Ray tracing takes a different approach: it simulates how light actually behaves. The GPU traces rays between your camera, the surfaces in the scene, and the light sources, and works out what light really reaches each pixel — bounces, reflections, soft shadows and all. No math required on your end; the point is simply that lighting is calculated rather than faked. The results are physically believable in situations where rasterization visibly cheats. The cost is that tracing all those rays is brutally expensive.

Decoding the Ray Tracing Menu

Games rarely offer one "ray tracing" toggle. You'll usually see several, and they're not equally valuable:

• RT reflections — the most visible win. Mirrors, wet streets, glass, and glossy floors reflect the actual scene, including things off-screen. If you only enable one RT effect, make it this one.
• RT shadows — subtle. Shadows get softer edges and more accurate contact points. Most people can't spot the difference in motion.
• RT global illumination (GI) — transformative in the right games. Light bounces naturally between surfaces, so a red wall tints the room red and interiors stop looking flat. In games built around it, GI changes the entire mood of a scene.
• RT ambient occlusion (AO) — a modest upgrade to the contact shading in corners and crevices. Nice, rarely dramatic.
• Path tracing — the everything version. Nearly all lighting is simulated with rays. It's the most stunning and by far the heaviest option, genuinely a generational leap in image quality — and in GPU load.

What It Costs, Honestly

Costs vary wildly by game and GPU, so treat these as rough ranges rather than promises. A single effect like RT reflections or shadows typically costs somewhere around 15–30% of your frame rate. Stacking multiple effects or enabling RT GI often lands in the 30–50% range. Full path tracing without upscaling can halve your frame rate or worse — even flagship GPUs can drop from well over 100 FPS to the 30s in the heaviest titles. Some games are also much better optimized than others, so the same GPU can pay very different prices for similar-looking effects.

Why Upscaling Made RT Viable

Raw ray tracing performance is only half the story. Upscalers render the game at a lower internal resolution and reconstruct a sharp image, clawing back much of the FPS that ray tracing takes away, and frame generation adds interpolated frames on top. The combination is why path tracing is playable at all on consumer hardware. If you're turning on RT, you should almost always pair it with upscaling — our DLSS vs FSR vs XeSS guide covers which one to use.

The Hardware Reality

NVIDIA's RTX cards are generally the strongest at ray tracing and pair it with the most mature upscaling stack. AMD has improved meaningfully with its recent generations, and its cards handle lighter RT workloads well, though heavy path tracing still favors NVIDIA. Intel's Arc cards punch above their price in RT but sit in the entry-to-mid tier. On genuinely entry-level GPUs from any vendor, ray tracing usually isn't worth the frame rate you give up. See our NVIDIA vs AMD breakdown and the GPU ranking to place your card.

When It's Worth It — and When to Skip

Turn it on when you're playing a single-player showcase (the cyberpunk cities, the atmospheric horror games, the big RPGs), you have a mid-range-or-better GPU, and you're happy to use upscaling. These games are built to be looked at, and RT is part of the experience.

Skip it for competitive shooters, where frames win fights and nobody admires reflections mid-gunfight. Skip it on budget cards, where the cost outweighs the eye candy. And skip it if you're chasing a high-refresh target — 144+ FPS and heavy RT rarely coexist. Our guide to what is a good FPS explains where those targets come from.

Recommendations by GPU Tier

• Budget: Leave ray tracing off. Spend your GPU budget on resolution and frame rate instead; well-done rasterized lighting still looks great.
• Mid-range: Enable RT reflections (and maybe GI) in single-player games, with upscaling on Quality mode. Skip path tracing.
• High-end: Enable full RT or path tracing in showcase titles, paired with upscaling and frame generation. This is what you paid for.

Test It, Per Game

Ray tracing's value is game-by-game: transformative in one title, invisible in the next. Toggle it, stand somewhere with water or glass, and check both the visuals and the frame rate before committing. And since RT is only one line in the settings menu, see the 7 settings that matter for the rest of the picture.