Ray tracing is a way to calculate how rays interact with a 3D scene to produce effects such as reflections, shadows, and lighting. In real-time games it usually supplements rasterization rather than replacing it: rasterization draws most of the scene, while ray tracing handles selected effects. The visual improvement and performance cost depend on the game, effect, hardware, resolution, and settings—not simply on whether a game says it supports ray tracing.
How ray tracing works
A renderer launches rays through a representation of the scene, checks what geometry they intersect, and uses the result to help shade pixels. The renderer also needs to handle rays that hit or miss and apply appropriate shader logic. In a simple reflection example, a ray can help determine which object or surface should appear reflected in a pixel.
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Testing every ray against every triangle would be inefficient. APIs such as DirectX Raytracing (DXR) use acceleration structures to organize scene geometry and make intersection searches more practical. DXR distinguishes bottom-level structures, which contain geometry, from top-level structures, which represent instances of those structures. These structures still have to be built or updated and use system resources; they do not make ray tracing free.
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Rasterization is an established way to turn 3D geometry into a 2D image. Real-time ray tracing can provide useful information for particular effects, while rasterization continues to handle much of the scene. Microsoft’s Direct3D team described the intended flexibility this way: “This means that it’s now possible for developers to build games that use rasterization for some of its rendering and raytracing to be used for the rest.” Microsoft’s DXR announcement framed ray tracing as something developers could integrate with existing DirectX rendering, not necessarily as a wholesale replacement.
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Khronos likewise describes real-time Vulkan ray tracing as typically combining a rasterized scene with ray-traced aspects. A game’s ray-tracing option may therefore activate one effect or several; the label alone does not tell you how much of the image is produced with rays.
What changes in the image
Reflections
Ray-traced reflections can show scene detail that is outside the camera view. Screen-space reflections (SSR) use information visible on the screen, so they cannot directly reflect objects that are off-screen. NVIDIA’s 2019 explainer, updated in 2020, discusses this limitation and describes acceleration structures and denoising. It is a vendor explanation, not an independent comparative test.
Shadows, ambient occlusion, and indirect lighting
Games may use ray tracing for shadows, ambient occlusion, or indirect and global illumination, as well as reflections. Each is a separate implementation choice. The result depends on factors such as the scene, materials, effect settings, and how the game combines ray-traced results with its other rendering techniques. “Ray tracing on” is not a precise description of a visual change.
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Selective ray tracing versus path tracing
Selective ray tracing adds rays for particular effects or parts of a rendering pipeline. Path tracing is a broader approach that traces multiple light paths or bounces to approximate how light travels through a scene. The terms are related, but they are not interchangeable: enabling a ray-traced reflection does not mean a game is fully path traced.
Why ray tracing can lower frame rates
Tracing rays requires GPU work to traverse acceleration structures and find intersections with scene geometry. A bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) can reduce the number of primitive intersection checks, but traversing it still takes computation. Acceleration structures also need to be built or updated. Denoising can make noisy results look smoother and allow a renderer to use fewer rays, but it does not eliminate the underlying workload.
Some graphics hardware has dedicated acceleration for portions of ray tracing; other implementations rely more heavily on programmable shader resources. Support for ray tracing therefore does not imply a single level of performance. NVIDIA identifies the game, resolution, settings, ray-tracing type, and quality level as factors that can change performance, but that vendor guidance does not establish a universal frame-rate penalty.
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- Real-Time Ray Tracing: Equipped with Turing architecture, the RTX 2060 Super supports real-time ray tracing technology. This feature allows for realistic lighting, shadows, and reflections, enhancing visual fidelity in supported games and applications.
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For a useful performance comparison, hold the conditions constant:
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- Keep the GPU, resolution, and quality settings the same.
- Record whether ray tracing is on and which effect or quality level is enabled.
- Keep upscaling and frame generation settings consistent, or report them clearly if they differ.
Without those details, a frame-rate figure may not describe the performance difference a player would see on their own system. There is no universal penalty or visual gain that applies to every game and graphics card.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What DXR, Vulkan Ray Tracing, and RT cores mean
| Term | What it means | What it does not tell you |
|---|---|---|
| DXR | Microsoft’s ray-tracing extension for DirectX 12. Its functional specification supports hardware with or without dedicated ray-tracing acceleration. Microsoft’s DXR specification describes the programming model and its structures and shaders. | The API name alone does not identify which visual effects a game uses or predict its frame rate. |
| Vulkan Ray Tracing | Khronos extensions that integrate ray-tracing functionality into Vulkan through Vulkan, SPIR-V, and shader-language extensions. Khronos describes the design as cross-platform and multi-vendor, with uses in real-time hybrid rendering and offline production. Khronos’ overview explains the Vulkan approach. | It is a different API framework from DirectX; the name does not guarantee a particular image quality or performance level. |
| Acceleration structure | A data structure organized to make ray-and-geometry intersection searches more efficient. In DXR, bottom-level structures contain geometry and top-level structures represent instances. | It does not remove the cost of traversal, structure updates, or the rest of the ray-tracing workload. |
| RT cores or dedicated acceleration | Vendor terminology for hardware that accelerates some ray-tracing operations. NVIDIA says its RT cores accelerate BVH traversal and ray/triangle intersections. | “RT cores” is not a universal name or implementation across graphics vendors, and dedicated acceleration does not specify total game performance. |
Do you need an RTX graphics card?
The API and hardware terms are not interchangeable. DXR’s programming model allows hardware with or without dedicated ray-tracing acceleration, while vendors may use their own names for dedicated hardware. Whether a particular game can use ray tracing on a particular GPU—and how well it runs—is a separate compatibility and performance question. Check the game’s requirements and current independent benchmarks for that exact title, GPU, resolution, and settings rather than treating a feature label as a performance guarantee.
Quick Recap
How to judge whether ray tracing is worth enabling
- Identify the specific effect the setting controls; a game may offer separate toggles or quality levels.
- Compare the same scene with the effect on and off at the same resolution and other settings.
- Look for the visual change that matters to you, such as more complete reflections or different shadowing.
- Check frame rate under the same conditions, including whether upscaling or frame generation is active.
- Decide whether that effect is worth its performance cost on your system; there is no universal answer across games.
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