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One free scan finds every outdated or missing driver and matches the right update for your exact hardware.Free scan · exact hardware matchRay tracing can make selected reflections, shadows, and lighting respond more directly to the scene, but it costs additional rendering work. Rasterization remains an efficient way to draw most game frames, so many games combine the two rather than replacing rasterization outright. There is no universal FPS penalty: the result depends on the game, effect, scene, resolution, settings, and GPU.
How rasterization and ray tracing render a game
Rasterization turns geometry into screen pixels
Rasterization projects geometric primitives onto the screen, determines which fragments are visible, and shades them through the graphics pipeline. It is a long-established real-time rendering method, not a synonym for crude graphics: games can produce sophisticated results with rasterization and carefully designed lighting approximations.
Ray tracing queries the scene along rays
Ray tracing sends rays through a scene to find geometry intersections and calculate selected light interactions. In Direct3D, scene geometry is organized into bottom-level acceleration structures, while instances are represented by a top-level acceleration structure. These structures are the scene representation used for ray-tracing queries, as described in Microsoft’s Direct3D acceleration-structure documentation.
Many games use a hybrid approach
A game can rasterize most of a frame and ray trace only selected effects. AMD GPUOpen’s examples combine ray-traced shadows with rasterized shadow maps, and screen-space reflections with ray tracing. Those examples illustrate that ray tracing is a tool for particular passes, not a necessary replacement for every rasterized pass; see AMD GPUOpen’s DirectX 12 resources.
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What changes visually when ray tracing is enabled?
The difference depends on the effect the game ray traces and the technique it replaces or supplements. Ray-traced reflections can include scene details outside the screen, unlike methods limited to information already visible in the image. Ray-traced shadows or indirect lighting can respond to scene geometry and light placement. These are potential advantages, not a guarantee that every scene will look better: the change may be subtle, the alternative may be well-crafted, or the effect may be configured differently in each game.
Check the game’s actual setting name and compare the same scene with the effect on and off. “Ray tracing” may refer to reflections, shadows, ambient occlusion, global illumination, or a combination; the label alone does not tell you which visual change to expect.
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Why ray tracing can lower frame rate
Ray tracing adds work to generate rays, traverse acceleration structures, process intersections and shader results, and often denoise noisy output when ray counts are limited. AMD’s RDNA Performance Guide advises tracing as few rays as possible while meeting the desired quality; it notes that one ray per pixel can still produce high-quality results with a good denoiser. That is developer optimization guidance, not a promise about the performance of a particular game.
Acceleration structures introduce their own tradeoffs. Microsoft documents that Direct3D’s PREFER_FAST_TRACE option prioritizes tracing performance at the expense of more build time, while PREFER_FAST_BUILD shortens construction but sacrifices tracing performance. The API reference says the fast-trace option typically takes two to three times the default build time, and the fast-build option typically takes one-half to one-third of default build time. These ratios describe acceleration-structure build time for those API options; they are not estimates of FPS loss during gameplay. See Microsoft’s build-flags reference.
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Scene organization and how often structures must be built or updated also matter. AMD’s 2022-09-15 article on improving ray-tracing performance with RRA explains that large, overlapping bounding volumes can hurt traversal. Its terrain example describes splitting terrain into chunks to reduce overlap, while increasing top-level structure build time. That example shows why performance depends on engine and scene design as well as GPU capability.
Because these factors vary, the sources here do not establish a representative cross-game FPS penalty. A single percentage would be misleading without a named game, scene, GPU, resolution, settings, and test method.
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How to compare ray tracing on and off
- Identify the effect. Check whether the setting controls reflections, shadows, ambient occlusion, global illumination, or several effects.
- Use the same scene and conditions. Compare the same location, resolution, and quality settings so that the visual and performance differences have a clear cause.
- Record frame rate and frame-time stability. Average FPS alone does not show whether delivery is smooth; note the GPU and the test conditions alongside the results.
- Separate upscaling and frame generation. If you use either, report it separately rather than attributing the whole difference to ray tracing.
- Check the game’s quality/performance choices. Hybrid implementations and effect-specific settings can make a more useful comparison than a single global on/off label.
What GPU support does—and does not—tell you
API and hardware support are compatibility requirements, not a guarantee of a particular frame rate. For example, Microsoft’s Direct3D 12 ray-tracing sample collection lists a GPU and driver with DirectX 12 Ultimate support among its requirements. That requirement applies to those samples; it does not establish that every compatible GPU will run every ray-traced game well.
When assessing a GPU for a particular game, look for benchmarks of that game at the resolution and settings you intend to use. A useful comparison identifies the exact ray-traced effect and GPU, and states whether upscaling or frame generation is enabled. Compatibility by itself cannot answer the performance question.
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