Is ray tracing worth it? What it costs and what it adds

Traditional graphics approximate lighting with tricks. Ray tracing instead simulates how light travels: it follows rays from the camera through the scene and works out what they hit, how they reflect and where shadows fall. The result is more accurate reflections, shadows and lighting.

It is far more demanding, because the card has to do a lot of extra calculation for every frame. That is why dedicated hardware for it exists, and why the cost in frame rate is large.

Ray tracing is most visible in reflections on glossy and wet surfaces, in soft, accurate shadows, and in global illumination, where light bounces realistically around a room. In games that use it well, scenes look more grounded, particularly in dark or reflective environments.

In games that use it lightly, the difference can be hard to see, and some of those games lose more frame rate than the image gains. The quality of the implementation matters more than the presence of the option.

Enabling ray tracing usually costs a large share of your frame rate. The loss varies widely by game and setting. It can be modest with light ray tracing and very large with heavy implementations. Path tracing, the most complete form, costs far more again.

A card's ray tracing index on this site, set against its ordinary performance index, shows how much of its speed it keeps with ray tracing on. NVIDIA cards typically keep more of their speed than AMD cards of similar raster performance, and the gap grows in heavy implementations.

Most people who use ray tracing also use upscaling and, where it is supported, frame generation. The upscaler renders at a lower resolution and reconstructs the image, which buys back much of the lost frame rate. Without it, ray tracing is out of reach for most cards in demanding games.

That is why the choice of card matters. A card with strong ray tracing hardware and a good upscaler gets the most out of the feature, and the upscaling guide explains what each company offers.

Pay for ray tracing performance if you play games that use it well and you care about how they look more than about the highest frame rate. Do not pay for it if you play mostly competitive games, where frame rate and responsiveness matter most and ray tracing is rarely used.

At the budget end, treat it as a bonus and not a requirement. Cards at that price run out of speed long before ray tracing becomes comfortable, and the money is better spent on memory and raw performance.

Look up the games you play most and check whether they have ray tracing and how it looks in reviews. If the answer is none, or only light use, a card chosen on rasterisation and price will serve you better.

If your favourites are among the heavy users, choose a card with a high ray tracing index for its price and plan to use upscaling. The ray tracing ranking shows the cards that currently do that best.