If there’s one thing gaming companies want you to get excited about these days, it’s ray tracing. Nvidia ditched GTX for RTX just to highlight its importance, AMD and Intel have added ray tracing to their graphics cards, and it’s even available on the latest Playstation and Xbox. If you ask them, ray tracing is the future, and you should definitely buy the best GPU possible unless you want to miss out.
On the other hand, we’ve heard this song and dance before. Sega hyped up “blast processing,” which wasn’t used in a single Sega Genesis title, and Xbox hyped up the Kinect motion sensor before scrapping it. There have been countless technological fads over the last few years, and is ray tracing any different? Here’s what you need to know about ray tracing, and whether it’s another cheap gimmick or the future of gaming graphics.
Ray tracing: a way to create more realistic lighting
Source: Henrik
Simply put, ray tracing is a way to accurately render lighting in 3D, and is considered to be the best method for creating realistic lighting effects like shadows and reflections. You might think “so what?” when comparing ray tracing to 4K, VR, or AI, especially when good lighting can already be accomplished with traditional 3D rendering techniques such as rasterization. Still, ray tracing is a means of bringing even more realism to 3D graphics, and in that sense, it’s in the same vein as something like 4K.
The simple explanation for ray tracing is that it calculates realistic lighting by doing it the same way our eyes work but in reverse. For humans, light waves from the sun or light bulbs either hit our eyes directly or bounce off other objects until they hit our eyes, and then the brain processes all that information. For ray tracing, the camera sends out rays, and when they hit something, they then travel to any relevant sources of light. If the ray hits another object while going to the light source, that will make a shadow.
Ray tracing entered the gaming community’s collective consciousness in 2018 when Nvidia first announced its RTX 20 series, which were the first gaming GPUs to support the feature. However, Nvidia didn’t invent ray tracing or even the ability for a graphics card to accomplish it. Ray tracing has been around for decades; movies like Monster House and Cars were rendered with ray tracing. What Nvidia accomplished was creating hardware that was so good at ray tracing that it could not only render it much faster than ever before but could do it in real-time, an achievement Nvidia called the “holy grail of graphics.”
What to expect with ray tracing in games
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Although ray tracing isn’t used solely for games, it’s a big-ticket feature for the latest GPUs, so I’ll mostly be focusing on how ray tracing impacts the gaming experience. Because we all like to play games with a framerate of at least 30 FPS, ray tracing was never a thing before the RTX 20 series, and some of the first games to get ray tracing support were games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Battlefield V in 2018. Not all games implement all the possible ray-tracing features, with some only featuring ray-traced shadows or global illumination, for instance.
To date, the only desktop GPUs with hardware-accelerated ray tracing are Nvidia’s RTX 20, 30, and 40 series, AMD’s RX 6000 and 7000 series, and Intel’s Arc Alchemist series. Although the image quality between all these vendors is equal, performance is not. While the RTX 4080 and RX 7900 XTX perform about the same in rasterized scenes without ray tracing, the 4080 is generally faster when it’s enabled. AMD’s cards are usually weaker for ray tracing than Nvidia’s or Intel’s. Additionally, ray tracing benefits from beefier hardware, so higher-end cards can get a higher framerate than lower-end ones. There are some smartphone chipsets that support it too, with Arm‘s next generation of Immortalis GPUs improving on it as well.
One significant problem for ray tracing is that it’s a much, much slower method for rendering even with hardware acceleration. In the latest titles, the highest level of ray tracing will easily cut your framerate in half. And here’s the kicker: games only partially ray-trace scenes. That’s how slow and intensive ray tracing is. Nvidia pushes DLSS as the technology that makes ray tracing playable at framerates more palatable than 30 FPS, but there’s no getting around the fact that ray tracing is a performance killer.
The other problem is there aren’t many games that support it. According to the PCGamingWiki, there are 170 games with ray tracing, but the list it provides only shows about 90. Some of those games are titles like Minecraft and Quake II, which are definitely great games, but not exactly rich in graphical fidelity compared to modern, AAA titles. Ray tracing is already kind of difficult to implement in games, and when you consider only DX12 and Vulkan support ray tracing in the first place, it becomes easy to see how we only have a few supported games right now.
Is ray tracing a gimmick or a genuinely useful feature?
Source: Nvidia
Ever since Nvidia’s RTX 20 series came out, people have argued back and forth about the utility of ray tracing. On the one hand, it’s undeniably the most realistic method for rendering light, and it’s a great way to use a high-end rig with a top-end GPU and CPU. But on the other hand, it’s a framerate killer and there are only like 20 ray tracing games that come out every year, at least right now.
The one thing that really prevents ray tracing from becoming a video game cornerstone is, ultimately, its lack of support, which has been a chronic problem for years now. When Nvidia first announced its first RTX GPUs and RTX software in 2018, it also promised ray tracing would come to 21 existing and upcoming titles. Of those 21, it has only made it to 9 of those titles in one form or another. Ray tracing isn’t even in Atomic Heart, which Nvidia heavily promoted starting in 2018.
At present, even if you have a GPU that supports hardware-accelerated ray tracing, the performance might not be good enough to warrant turning it on. That’s not to say the technology doesn’t have a future, but in the here and now, ray tracing is a niche feature, somewhere between a gimmick and the next big thing. We know it can make 3D scenes look great judging by the latest movies, but that requires ray tracing to be in more games, and having faster graphics cards would be good too.