Ray tracing is a way to render a 3D scene by tracing rays and calculating where they intersect objects and how light interacts with them. In games, it can produce more consistent reflections, shadows and indirect lighting than rasterization-only shortcuts—but it takes extra processing. Real-time graphics therefore usually combine ray tracing with rasterization rather than replacing rasterization altogether.
What ray tracing does
A renderer must turn a scene of objects, materials and lights into a 2D image. Rasterization creates that image by projecting geometry onto the screen and determining which surfaces are visible at each pixel. Ray tracing takes a different approach: it follows rays through the scene, tests where they hit geometry, and evaluates the resulting light interactions.
That makes ray tracing useful for effects that are difficult to reproduce consistently with raster-only techniques. A reflection can account for objects beyond the visible screen; a shadow can respond to the scene’s geometry and light; and global illumination can represent light reaching a surface indirectly after bouncing elsewhere. These effects depend on what the renderer traces and how it shades the results—not simply on turning on a single universal “ray-traced” look.
How ray tracing works in a real-time game
Prepare the scene for intersection tests
Checking every ray against every piece of geometry would be too costly for an interactive frame. Instead, a ray-tracing renderer organizes scene geometry into acceleration structures that help it find possible intersections more efficiently. The application still has to build or update those structures as the scene changes.
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Trace rays and shade the results
The renderer launches rays for selected effects, determines what they hit, and runs shader work to evaluate the surface and lighting. A game may trace rays for reflections, shadows, ambient occlusion or global illumination; it need not trace every light path or every pixel in the same way.
Denoise and combine the image
Real-time effects often work from a limited number of rays per pixel, which can make the raw result noisy. Denoising uses spatial and temporal information—relationships among nearby pixels and across frames—to reduce that noise. The renderer then combines ray-traced results with rasterized scene data and other rendering passes. NVIDIA’s Real-Time Denoisers are designed for low ray-per-pixel inputs and use spatiotemporal information to approach ground-truth images; denoising is part of the practical trade-off, not a guarantee that every result will be artifact-free.
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Why real-time ray tracing became practical
Interactive rendering has to complete its work quickly enough to keep a game responsive. Ray tracing became more practical through a combination of GPU parallelism, acceleration structures, explicit graphics APIs and, on supported GPUs, dedicated hardware acceleration.
Microsoft’s DirectX Raytracing (DXR) extends Direct3D 12. Its application model includes pipeline state objects, acceleration structures and shader tables, and is designed to run on hardware with or without dedicated ray-tracing acceleration. NVIDIA documents specialized RT cores in GeForce RTX GPUs for DXR workloads. Dedicated hardware can accelerate relevant work, but it does not remove the costs of tracing, shading, memory use or denoising.
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Vulkan Ray Tracing is another low-level route, documented by Khronos. Both DXR and Vulkan expose acceleration structures and programmable ray-tracing stages. The exact feature set and support depend on the device and driver, so API support alone does not establish that a particular game’s ray-tracing features will run on a given system.
Ray tracing versus rasterization
Neither approach is simply “better” in every respect. Rasterization is an efficient foundation for drawing interactive scenes; ray tracing can improve selected lighting effects, with additional computation and hardware requirements. In many engines, the useful comparison is between a hybrid renderer and a rasterization-only renderer.
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| Consideration | Rasterization | Ray tracing |
|---|---|---|
| Image accuracy for selected light effects | Often relies on effect-specific approximations or shortcuts. | Can evaluate scene intersections and light interactions directly for the effects being traced. |
| Frame time and FPS | Generally avoids the extra ray-intersection and denoising work. | Adds intersection, shading, memory and often denoising work; the performance impact depends on the effect and implementation. |
| Hardware support | Supported across a broad range of graphics hardware. | Depends on compatible device and driver support; dedicated acceleration is available on some GPUs. |
| Noise and image stability | Does not have ray-sampling noise, though its approximations have their own limitations. | Limited ray samples can be noisy, so denoising and temporal information may be needed. |
| Energy and thermal budget | Uses the GPU’s rendering resources without the same ray-tracing workload. | Additional computation can increase GPU workload; the actual energy and thermal effect depends on hardware and settings. |
| API portability | Available through established graphics APIs. | DXR extends Direct3D 12 on Windows; Vulkan Ray Tracing offers a low-level cross-platform path. Actual feature support varies by device and driver. |
The practical choice is often selective: enable ray tracing for the effect that matters most, then compare the resulting image and performance with the game’s rasterized option. A reflection-heavy scene may benefit noticeably from ray-traced reflections, while a different game or setting may make another effect—or no ray-traced effect—a better use of the available rendering budget.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Why ray tracing lowers FPS
Every frame has a finite amount of GPU work. Ray tracing adds intersection tests and shader calculations, consumes memory resources, and may require denoising before the image is ready. If those tasks push a frame beyond the time available for smooth interaction, frame rate falls. The size of the drop is not universal: it changes with the game, the selected effects, the scene, the GPU and the settings.
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When a game offers separate ray-tracing controls, reduce or disable the effect that costs more than it contributes to the image you care about. Compare one change at a time so you can see which effect is responsible for the visual improvement and performance cost. A faster GPU or dedicated ray-tracing acceleration may help, but support and performance remain specific to the title and configuration.
What GPU do you need for ray tracing?
There is no single GPU requirement for ray tracing as a whole. The game or application sets the relevant requirements, and API, device and driver support can differ. NVIDIA documents RT cores in GeForce RTX GPUs for DXR workloads, while Microsoft’s DXR model can also run without dedicated ray-tracing acceleration. The presence of an API path does not promise equal performance on all hardware.
- Check the specific game’s system requirements and its supported ray-tracing features.
- Confirm the GPU and driver support the API and features that game uses.
- Consider whether you want ray tracing enabled at your preferred resolution and settings, rather than relying on a general compatibility label alone.
Where real-time ray tracing is used
Games and interactive visualization use DXR or Vulkan paths to add ray-traced effects to responsive 3D scenes. Ray tracing also has uses beyond games: NVIDIA’s OptiX guide lists film and television visual effects, CAD, light-map generation, high-performance computing and LiDAR simulation. These applications can have different performance goals from a game that must render each frame interactively.
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