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Ray tracing calculates how light interacts with objects in a 3D scene to produce selected pixels or effects—often reflections, shadows, or indirect lighting. It does not automatically mean a game traces every pixel or looks photorealistic. Most real-time games combine ray tracing with rasterization, and the work involved depends on exactly what the game traces.
What ray tracing does
Microsoft’s Direct3D team describes the basic idea this way: “Raytracing calculates the color of pixels by tracing the path of light that would have created it and simulates this ray of light’s interactions with objects in the virtual world.” In practice, the renderer sends rays through a representation of the scene, finds where they intersect geometry, and uses the hit point, the object’s material, and an estimate of incoming light to determine a pixel’s color. Microsoft’s DirectX explanation of ray tracing contrasts this with rasterization, which maps 3D primitives onto a 2D screen plane.
To estimate the light arriving at a surface, a renderer may trace additional paths: light could have bounced off another object or passed through a material. Those interactions can make reflections, shadows, and indirect lighting respond to scene geometry in ways that are difficult to reproduce with simpler approximations. But the result still depends on the game’s materials, lighting, scene data, ray budget, and reconstruction techniques; the label alone promises no particular level of realism.
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Why games combine ray tracing and rasterization
Rasterization is an efficient way to draw much of a game frame. It projects scene geometry onto the screen, with techniques such as depth buffering and culling helping limit work. Ray tracing follows rays through the scene instead, which can provide useful information for effects that rasterization handles less directly. A game can therefore rasterize most of its image and use rays only for selected pixels, surfaces, or effects. Microsoft’s DirectX description explicitly presents ray tracing as something that can be applied to only part of a frame, such as reflective surfaces.
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This hybrid approach means a “ray tracing” setting is not one universal rendering mode. It may switch on one effect while leaving the rest of the scene rendered conventionally. The practical question is not simply whether a game supports ray tracing, but what the setting traces and how broadly it applies it.
What a game may trace
Ray-traced effects can be implemented separately, and they do not necessarily carry the same workload. NVIDIA’s overview of DirectX ray tracing discusses multiple effect categories:
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- Reflections: Rays can find objects reflected in a surface, including scene detail that may be outside the camera’s view or hidden from a screen-space approximation. The effect still depends on which surfaces and scene elements the game includes.
- Shadows: Rays can test whether light is blocked between a surface and a light source, helping produce shadows shaped by the scene’s geometry.
- Global illumination: Rays can estimate indirect light that has bounced from other surfaces, affecting how areas receive light beyond direct illumination.
- Ambient occlusion and caustics: These are other possible ray-traced effects; their inclusion and implementation vary by game.
- Path tracing: Rather than tracing only a targeted effect, a broader path-tracing approach follows light paths through the scene to produce a more comprehensive lighting result. The name does not establish that a game uses this approach.
Turning on reflections is not equivalent to tracing more light bounces or path tracing an entire scene. Check the game’s graphics settings and documentation for the specific effect and quality level involved.
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1Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems2Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches3Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsWhy ray tracing takes work
A ray-tracing workload must determine which objects a ray hits. Testing every ray against every piece of scene geometry would be expensive, so renderers commonly use an acceleration structure such as a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) to reduce the number of ray-to-geometry intersection tests. Traversing that structure and calculating intersections still takes computational work.
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Real-time renderers also often use denoising: a reconstruction step that reduces visible noise in an image produced from a limited number of rays. Using fewer rays can make a real-time workload more manageable, though the final result depends on the implementation and image quality target. Supported GPUs may have dedicated hardware to accelerate ray traversal and intersections; that speeds parts of the workload rather than making every ray-traced effect cost-free.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Why there is no universal ray-tracing performance penalty
There is no reliable single percentage that describes the cost of ray tracing across games. The impact varies with the game, resolution, graphics settings, effect type, quality level, number of rays, and hardware. A limited reflection effect and a broader lighting workload do different amounts of work, and denoising or other reconstruction can change the balance between ray count and image quality.
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NVIDIA’s technical and performance discussion was published in 2019 and includes vendor-specific comparisons from that product era. It helps explain the workload, but those comparisons should not be treated as current GPU rankings or as a prediction for a particular game today. To judge a specific setting, use benchmarks for the same game, GPU, resolution, and quality settings—or compare the game’s own performance with that effect enabled and disabled.
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Before treating the setting as a blanket upgrade or a guaranteed frame-rate hit, identify what it changes:
- Effect: Does it add reflections, shadows, indirect lighting, or a broader path-traced result?
- Coverage: Is ray tracing limited to certain surfaces or effects, or applied more broadly across the scene?
- Quality: Does the game offer quality levels that may change ray count or reconstruction?
- Performance context: Compare results at the resolution and settings you actually use, on the relevant hardware.
- Image trade-off: Look for changes that matter in that game—such as reflected detail or bounced light—rather than assuming the label means every part of the image is improved.
These distinctions explain why two games’ ray-tracing options can look different and perform very differently. Ray tracing is a set of rendering techniques, not a single switch with a fixed visual result or cost.
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