Ray tracing
A rendering technique that simulates the physical paths of light rays, producing realistic reflections, refractions, and shadows. Hardware-accelerated on RTX (NVIDIA), RDNA 2+ (AMD), and Arc (Intel) GPUs.
Ray tracing computes light by tracing rays from the camera into a scene, bouncing them off surfaces according to material properties. The result: physically accurate reflections (including off-screen objects), realistic global illumination, and accurate soft shadows.
Performance cost
Even on a top-tier GPU, full path-traced rendering at 4K averages 30–60 fps without upscaling. DLSS/FSR/XeSS make it playable.
RT Cores vs shader-RT
NVIDIA's RT Cores accelerate BVH traversal and ray-triangle intersection in hardware. AMD's RT Accelerators do less in hardware and lean more on shaders; one generation behind NVIDIA in RT performance, closer in raster.
When to enable
On scenes with reflective surfaces (wet streets, glass, lakes) the visual upgrade is dramatic. On dry indoor scenes, the difference is subtle and the performance cost rarely justifies it without upscaling.