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Ray tracing calculates how rays interact with geometry in a 3D scene to help render effects such as reflections, shadows, and lighting. In real-time games, it usually supplements rasterization rather than replacing it: the game may use ray tracing for selected effects while rasterization draws most of the scene. The visual improvement and performance cost depend on the title, effect, hardware, resolution, and settings.
How ray tracing works
A renderer can trace rays through a representation of a scene, test what geometry they intersect, and use the result to decide how a pixel should be shaded. Depending on the effect, rays can help determine whether a surface is visible to a light, what appears in a reflection, or how light reaches a surface indirectly.
Testing every ray against every triangle would be expensive. Games therefore use acceleration structures to organize scene geometry so rays can find potential intersections more efficiently. This reduces the search work, but building or updating those structures and traversing them still takes time and resources. Microsoft’s DXR functional specification describes bottom-level acceleration structures for geometry and top-level structures for instances of that geometry.
Why games combine ray tracing with rasterization
Rasterization is an efficient way to determine which scene surfaces appear on screen. Ray tracing can provide additional information for particular effects, without requiring the game to trace every light path for every visible surface. Microsoft described this hybrid aim in its 2018 DXR announcement: “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.”
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Khronos similarly describes real-time Vulkan implementations as typically combining a rasterized scene with ray-traced aspects. A setting called “ray tracing” therefore does not tell you by itself how much of the renderer uses the technique. One game might apply it to reflections; another might offer several ray-traced effects. Full-scene path tracing is a broader approach, not a synonym for every selective ray-tracing feature.
What changes in the image
Reflections
Ray-traced reflections can show scene detail that is outside the camera view. Screen-space reflections (SSR) rely on information already visible on screen, so they cannot reliably reflect objects or areas that are off-screen. NVIDIA explains this limitation in its vendor explainer on ray tracing; it is an explanation of the technique, not independent comparative testing.
Shadows and lighting
Ray tracing can also be used for shadows, ambient occlusion, and indirect or global illumination. These effects estimate different aspects of how light and visibility interact with the scene. Whether the result looks better depends on the game’s materials, scene, implementation, and quality settings; ray tracing is a rendering method, not an automatic image-quality upgrade.
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Path tracing
Path tracing follows multiple light paths or bounces to approximate light transport more broadly. It is more extensive than enabling one ray-traced effect. Do not assume a game is fully path traced merely because it advertises ray tracing; the specific title’s developer or documentation needs to establish that.
Why ray tracing can lower frame rates
Ray tracing adds work for the GPU, including acceleration-structure traversal and ray-geometry intersection. Acceleration structures such as bounding volume hierarchies (BVHs) reduce the number of primitive checks, but do not eliminate the cost. The renderer may also build or update structures as the scene changes.
Denoising helps turn noisy results from a limited number of rays into a cleaner image. Casting fewer rays can reduce workload, but the visual outcome depends on the denoiser and implementation. Some GPUs have dedicated hardware that accelerates parts of ray tracing; other implementations rely more on programmable shader resources. Consequently, “supports ray tracing” does not describe one consistent performance level.
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Performance depends on the game, GPU, resolution, selected effect, quality settings, and the target image quality. Upscaling and frame-generation settings can also affect reported results. A useful GPU comparison needs the same game and scene, resolution, quality settings, upscaling and frame-generation state, and measurement method. There is no universal frame-rate penalty that applies across games and hardware.
What DXR, Vulkan Ray Tracing, and RT cores mean
- DXR: Microsoft’s ray-tracing extension for DirectX 12. The DXR functional specification supports hardware with or without dedicated ray-tracing acceleration.
- Vulkan Ray Tracing: Khronos extensions that add ray-tracing functionality to Vulkan, using Vulkan, SPIR-V, and shader-language extensions. Khronos describes the design as cross-platform and multi-vendor, and notes uses in real-time hybrid rendering and offline production rendering. Vulkan and DirectX are separate APIs, even though they offer related capabilities.
- Acceleration structure: A data structure that helps organize geometry for efficient ray intersection. DXR divides these into bottom-level structures containing geometry and top-level structures representing instances.
- RT cores: NVIDIA’s term for dedicated hardware that, according to its ray-tracing explainer, accelerates BVH traversal and ray-triangle intersections. The name and implementation should not be generalized to all vendors.
- Path tracing: A broader rendering approach that traces multiple light paths or bounces to approximate how light travels through a scene. It is not equivalent to adding one ray-traced effect.
An API name describes a framework developers can use; it does not specify which visual effect a game implements or predict its frame rate. Those depend on the game’s renderer, settings, hardware, and implementation.
How to judge a ray-tracing setting
- Check which effect the game’s setting enables: reflections, shadows, ambient occlusion, indirect lighting, or several effects.
- Compare the same scene with the effect on and off, using the same resolution and other graphics settings.
- Assess whether the visual change matters in the scenes you play, including details such as off-screen reflections.
- For performance comparisons, keep the GPU, quality target, upscaling, frame-generation state, and measurement method consistent.
These checks separate the actual trade-off in a particular game from the broad label “ray tracing.”
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