Raytracing is controversial among gamers: some appreciate the beautiful graphics, while others criticize the high demands.
Raytracing is considered one of the graphical innovations in recent years, alongside upscaling (DLSS/FSR), when looking at video games in general. It all actually started in 2018. Features like path tracing and ray reconstruction build on ray tracing.
Because here, Nvidia not only presented its first RTX cards but also explained which games would support ray tracing for the first time. These included games like Battlefield V from EA, as well as Control, MechWarrior 5, or Shadow of the Tomb Raider. The first MMORPG with ray tracing was actually Justice Online, which has been playable on Steam since the end of 2025.
Since then, more and more games have supported ray tracing technology, since around 2020, you can also use ray tracing with AMD cards (since RX 6000).
Nevertheless, ray tracing is highly controversial among gamers: while some praise the significantly improved graphics, others criticize the high hardware demands. And the price to sacrifice performance for better graphics is rejected by many.
Raytracing: Beautiful game world, but at a (too) high price
What does ray tracing actually do? Ray tracing is a graphics technology that simulates the physical behavior of light. Millions of light rays are accurately calculated as they are reflected, refracted, or absorbed by certain surfaces.
The advantage: Ray tracing makes games appear much more believable and immersive. Games like Cyberpunk 2077, Metro: Exodus, or the newer Hogwarts: Legacy show you how believable a world can look thanks to ray tracing.
What’s the catch? The major issue with ray tracing is the high performance requirement. You need a lot of computational power, and often the FPS rate drops significantly when using ray tracing. To mitigate the losses somewhat, the technology is often combined with DLSS or FSR.
Many therefore see ray tracing as more of a marketing promise and a clever ploy to sell better hardware. Nvidia has long touted ray tracing as the selling point for its RTX graphics cards since AMD’s cards could not do so for a long time.
Especially in a time when poorly optimized PC games often hit the market, ray tracing, which adds extra performance demands, is seen as another problem by many. The friendly suggestion to enable DLSS/FSR for better performance often rubs many players the wrong way.
However, there are also users who argue that ray tracing is not the problem in itself: if the technology were not so compute-intensive, acceptance among players toward the technology would be much greater (via Reddit.com).
If you want to get more out of your gaming PC, you might consider buying a new graphics card. But does it even matter whether I choose AMD or Nvidia in the end? MyMMO presents the similarities and differences between AMD and Nvidia and explains what you should consider before your next graphics card purchase: How important is it for a graphics card whether I buy AMD or Nvidia?
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