Raytracing in games, 6 years in: was it really all that? Discuss.

Thursday, September 20th, 2018: it’s a date that may not hold much significance for most, but it does for nVidia, as one of the most important products in the company’s history was released in the United States. The GeForce RTX 2080 was the first consumer-level graphics card to feature real-time raytracing hardware support, meaning that it sported custom RT cores – alongside the dedicated tensor cores used for AI – specifically designed to accelerate complex calculations focused on this particular lighting technique.

Real-time raytracing – the simulation of how light interacts with every single thing present in a virtual scene, as it happens – has been something of a unicorn in the 3D animation industry for decades. No wonder, then, that the release of the GeForce RTX 2080 was hailed by nVidia as nothing less than a new chapter in the evolution of computer graphics. In some respects, it actually was. In others – when it comes to PC games and video games, for instance – it’s fair to say that one would have expected it to offer more, certainly to mean more, than what it currently does. Especially after more than half a decade of consumer availability.

With Sony’s new PS5 Pro model promising a jump of anything between 200% and 300% in raytracing performance compared to the current PS5 model – and AMD’s early 2025 RDNA4-based graphics cards promising greatly improved RT processing capabilities compared to the current RDNA3-based ones – this advanced lighting technique has once more attracted the attention of gamers and media alike.

So it’s been 6 years, to the day, since raytracing was introduced. Is it all that, after all?

A disappointing premiere followed by disappointingly slow progress

To answer that question today, one needs to recall how things started in terms of software support and performance back in 2018. In a word: badly. When the nVidia GeForce RTX 2080 was released in September 2018 there was not a single PC game supporting raytracing: twenty one of those had been announced earlier on but consumers would have to wait for a while before the first new ones (or patched older ones) started offering RT features here and there. It was not that easy, apparently, to implement this advanced lighting technique in modern games, even when nVidia’s graphics cards handled the necessary calculations on a hardware level.

When things did start rolling in terms of software support, the second issue with raytracing became painfully apparent: we all knew it would demand a lot of computational resources, but few were prepared to see their frame rates literally cut in half when RT features were enabled in most PC games offering them. In retrospect, it’s fair to say that the nVidia RTX 2xxx line of graphics cards were powerful enough to only introduce raytracing to the world, not actually handle it in a way that would easily allow for 60 FPS or even 30 FPS gaming in modern titles (unless one likes to game at 576p). Even DLSS could not make up for the performance hit induced by Raytracing 1.0, so to speak (then again that first version of DLSS had its own issues too). It was, frankly, something of a mess.

Adding insult to injury was the fact for much of 2019 the raytraced visuals delivered by most PC games – with the exception of Metro Exodus – were not all that exciting anyway. Yours truly can remember on multiple occasions activating the RT features offered by any given title only to immediately deactivate them because there was simply not enough of a visual improvement or even difference (certainly not enough to justify the frame rate cost). That started to change with the release of Remedy’s Control in late August 2019: this was the first PC game that properly showed off how raytracing can help the environmental lighting, surfaces, objects and special effects of modern titles become way more believable than before.

The PS5 and the Xbox Series X have nowhere near enough power to handle full raytracing, but they did introduce it as a visual technology to a considerably wider audience.

There were no other examples in PC gaming that got close to Control for all of 2020 when it comes to RT actually making a difference in visual impact. But then the consoles happened: the PlayStation5 and Xbox Series X launched in November of that year promising “raytracing support” but really meaning “select raytracing effects support” (a big difference). Some games did feature those effects here and there, though, offering mainstream gamers their first taste of what properly calculated reflections look like. Neither Sony’s nor Microsoft’s home entertainment systems are powerful enough to handle fully raytraced games at playable frame rates, but raytracing started to get mentioned more often – which can only be a good thing for any new tech.

It’s fair to say that raytracing has been a wild ride since then. On one hand, considerably more PC games started taking advantage of it in a meaningful way – ranging from certain Sony high quality PlayStation ports to patched productions like Doom Eternal – while console games became bolder in using it despite their inherent limitations. On the other hand, it became clear to all that (a) raytracing is not suitable for all types of games and (b) the approach of each implementation really does matter, as evident in the problematic way the PC version of Minecraft employed it or in the way Ghostwire Tokyo overdid it – by making everything too shiny – respectively.

At the very least, though, there are now a few excellent examples showing off what high-quality raytracing can do when carefully implemented. Control is still one such title, but last year’s Alan Wake 2 along with the seriously upgraded Cyberpunk 2077 are even more impressive as they both utilize what experts call “path tracing” or “full raytracing” along with most other advanced visual effects currently available to developers.

These two titles make such good use of these features that, at high enough resolutions, one can easily mistake screenshots or sometimes even footage of either for prerendered, instead of real-time, material. Graphics mods can take things even further, offering a glimpse of what PC and console gamers can expect from AAA titles in three of four years’ time – which, come to think of it, is not as far into the future as 2018 was to today.

Performance, of course, is still an issue – as another RT-heavy title, last month’s Black Myth Wukong, convincingly demonstrated. It’s even easy to overwhelm the most powerful consumer graphics cards available the day this story was published – e.g. certain overclocked nVidia RTX 4090 models – by using the most demanding of the aforementioned photorealistic graphics mods on Cyberpunk 2077.

There’s clearly a long way to go in terms of hardware improvements before raytracing can be enjoyed by consumers purchasing mainstream-priced graphics cards and intending to game at 4K. Then again, the next generation of GPUs for PCs is just around the corner and the PS5 Pro is specifically targeting raytracing as a standout feature. Maybe performance really is sort of a… temporary problem, then?

The “raytracing-only” games conundrum

So, even if it took five years and three generations of GPU hardware, there are now a few examples of how raytracing really can make PC games or video games look better. It’s not just a lick of shiny paint over rasterized 3D graphics: the potential is clearly there. But it’s also fair to say that, if discussed in the context of gaming as a whole, raytracing has not had great impact on this particular entertainment medium, not yet anyway, for one simple reason: it only ever has to do with visual fidelity. Nothing more.

Before throwing one’s hands in the air exclaiming “but it’s just a lighting technique!”, one might want to consider what raytracing actually does: it calculates how everything within a given three-dimensional scene interacts with a light source and then how the resulting interactions interact with each other, all in real time. It is pretty much a full-on simulation of how a virtual scene would look in the real world if lit by sources of the designer’s choosing in terms of position, intensity, color, movement you name it. It is much, much more than a simple lighting technique. It is a whole system, controllable in real time.

It is also an awful lot of calculations to be done just so that mirrors look believably reflective, glass spheres look believably refractive or water puddles look believably wet. Why not use all that calculated data to do something more interesting? Use light as a smart way to solve puzzles, for instance? Use reflections and refractions as tools or weapons? Why not build levels around the concept of light hitting surfaces or objects in ways that help or hinder progress? Why not design abilities or bonuses around the same concept? In other words, why not use RT data, since it’s calculated for visuals anyway, as a core gameplay element in modern games?

Raytracing does an awful lot of processing just so that mirrors look believably reflective, glass spheres look believably refractive or water puddles look believably wet. Why not use that data for something gameplay-related too?

Anyone who’s played e.g. Portal RTX can imagine how a game carefully using raytracing as a gameplay mechanic could prove to be immensely satisfying and extremely impressive on a visual level at the same time. For that to happen, a PC or console game would have to be specifically designed around that concept from the start – which means that it would require RT hardware in order to be played at all, since it’s extremely hard (if not impossible) to accurately simulate raytracing, let alone path tracing, in software in real time.

This is where it gets tricky. On one hand, with development costs of AAA or even AA productions being as high as they are nowadays, targeting systems that support a specific – fairly advanced – hardware feature sounds unwise to say the least. On the other hand, there are literally dozens of millions of graphics cards and gaming consoles out there now that can do raytracing on a basic level – such as RT reflections and RT shadows – at acceptable frame rates, as well as several million graphics cards capable of delivering high end visuals including path tracing.

It then becomes a question of how ambitious one wants to be with the overall design of a raytracing-based game and how scalable the visuals would have to be in order to deliver the gameplay mechanics needed by that design. It sounds doable – and such a game would drive sales of capable raytracing hardware, so maybe nVidia or AMD could help out in terms of resources – but, considering the state of the game development industry right now, it also sounds quite risky. Which is, frankly, a shame.

A promise unfulfilled… for now

Returning to the original question then: six years in, was – and indeed is – raytracing all that after all? As a whole, up until now… well, no. It seems that it wasn’t and still isn’t all that. It did not bring about the visual leap nVidia was promising, not for a very long time, and when it eventually did so it wasn’t in all types of games. It also was at great cost to frame rates and budgets. At the same time, it practically enforced the use of AI upscaling and frame generation in high-end gaming while not contributing in any way to new gameplay concepts or mechanics.

So it’s not hard to see why so many gamers are currently skeptical or indifferent towards raytracing. It simply did not deliver for so long, that people just lost interest: “raytraced this” and “raytraced that” now seem to be just bullet points in a modern AAA title’s feature list – bullet points that few consumers actually pay attention to. People still care way more about how a game plays than how it looks. As they very well should.

This does not necessarily mean that raytracing in PC games and video games was or indeed is a failure. It’s more of an unfulfilled promise, which is why many believers in this technology often claim that all PC games and console games will make use of raytracing in one way or another… someday.

Raytracing in modern PC or console games is not necessarily a failure – it’s more of an unfulfilled promise.

As unlikely as it may seem right now – there are several types of games and visual styles that have no actual use for raytracing, let us not forget – it’s possible that when the cost of graphics cards or APUs sufficiently powerful to handle path tracing at high resolutions and acceptable frame rates finally hits the mainstream market, this may still come to pass. Weirder things have happened, but – if current manufacturing costs and chipset roadmaps are taken into account – it will be a long while before we get to that point.

Raytracing in games still has much to prove and it looks like it will still be a few years before most consumers get to see what the fuss was all about in the first place. Here’s hope that, in the mean time, nVidia, AMD, Sony, Microsoft and game developers put in the effort to actually make creative, not just dazzling, use of raytracing. It would not be OK to wait another six years before we can decide whether this tech actually held real promise or not in the context of modern gaming. That’s not too much to ask, is it?