This is it. I finally get to talk about Ray Tracing enabled effects in games.
As a piece of technology, Ray Tracing is fantastic, the stuff of dreams, if I can be honest. Things will look as good as it can be once you add it. It’s also computational expensive, meaning it’ll have to be pre-rendered. Pixar movies have used it for ages now and that’s why they pop out so well, even back in the day.
We’re dabbled with Realtime Ray Tracing for quite some now, but it was only with Nvidia’s Turing generation that it got a boost. They rebranded their GeForce lineup from GTX to RTX and also made Ray Tracing synonymous to it. The RTX 20 lineup of GPUs, released in 2018, was the first taste we got related to RTRT (Realtime Ray Tracing) for consumers that wasn’t just another concept or a one-off.
It’s now 2025 and Ray Tracing remains more or less pointless in the grant scheme of things.
Too good? No, not good enough
The question now is why isn’t RT more common in games? To start off, it needs a lot of horsepower. We’re getting bigger and bigger GPUs, and it doesn’t seem to be an end to that. The list of RT enabled games is long but compare to the amount of games that we have, it’s just a minor blip on what it could be possible to have. For a long time, RT was only for one PC vendor, Nvidia, and that skewed the market as a whole, because the other vendor, AMD RTG, didn’t have it, and once it did, it wasn’t as good. AMD has also had console CPU+GPU contracts for over 12 years now, so it wasn’t necessary there either.
So is it too good? No, I’d say that RT isn’t good enough. The GPUs got massive, and performance seem to downgrade, as they (read: Nvidia) wanted to keep pushing it higher so people buy their cards. The so called ‘future of graphics’ might look good, but not when it makes your games slow down to a crawl.
And I think that’s it amounts to: Performance. Gamers are now used to really high framerates and Ray Tracing humbles back when PCs were just starting out. A paradigm shift to the graphics philosophy. But that’s the thing: RT is just too computationally expensive to be enjoyed as it is, and it make games go down to a crawl while the GPU itself is maxed out, trying to trace all the light rays and such. For MP games, this is essentially a death sentence, since 60+ fps is what makes sense. If your game is running between 15 to 20fps while playing MP, you’ll be suffering. At least it looks good, right? So the pitch here is to put it in SP games, and those will come down to a crawl as well but no MP means no latency issues, just framerate ones.
And then we quickly realize that’s not that useful to SP games either because optimization (has been destroyed). PC hardware has always been into this cycle of Bruteforce -> Optimize -> Bruteforce and repeat but with RT, we only got Bruteforcing to deal with. Doesn’t work well? Just make bigger GPU. Bigger GPU is working fine? Increase how many rays it can trace so it doesn’t work well again. That is just crazy dumb, because at some point, the downscale has to exist, GPU prices are out of control nowadays and it’ll only get worse, because bigger GPU = higher price tag.
Upscaling enters the scene and ruins optimization
Call it whatever you want, DLSS, XeSS, FSR, they all do the same thing: Upscaling. Upscalers are a cool tech that has been completely mishandled. Nvidia knew that RT was too expensive, so they created an Upscaling tech that would allow games to run at a decent framerate.
Without getting into specifics, Upscaling is the inverse of Downsampling, but both have a similar method of doing things. Upscaling takes the image, renders at a lower resolution and upscales it. Downsampling takes the image, renders at a higher resolution and downscales it.
With DLSS and RT, Nvidia could claim that they had the edge over graphics, and it was technically true. But several years later, DLSS is being used as the tool to optimize graphics, rather than to make them run even faster. Upscaling tech in general is now being used to get games to run at 60fps, which is insane. This is notthe way we should be going and it is apparently the way it is.
Optimization will always make things better and whatever you’re doing, mister developer, you should stop and think “can I run this game well with a 3 thousand dollars GPU?” and if the answer is ‘no’, then get ready to hear complaints.
Artstyles = Ruined
Here’s the thing about Ray Tracing, it can be very good when used effectively, demonstrating how ‘real’ things can be. But I’d argue that everything can be like that, RT is just another tool in the grand repertoire of developers for something.
Almost 5 years ago (June 2019), we got Quake 2 RTX, 3 years ago (December 2022), we got Portal with RTX and this month (March 2025), we got the Half-Life 2 RTX Remix thing. While Quake 2 RTX was rated ‘Good’, the other two are rated Mixed on Steam, with both Portal and HL2 already having Radiosity meaning that they have raytracing, just baked-in (not real time), and a complete destruction of the artstyle for both games. It’s quite funny, because Quake 2 with Ray Tracing does look good, and the artstyle wasn’t destroyed there but it was for Portal and HL2.
Only shows to prove that RT doesn’t make things look better just because it’s some sort of high end tech. You have to integrate Ray Tracing results into your game or mod to make it look better.
Why is it the new Gameworks?
In my opinion, which could be wrong, the amount of pushing done by Nvidia only resulted in a technology that wasn’t used in a plethora of games. Sure, plenty of them have used it, but this sort of thing needs to be used by all devs, big andsmall.
The blockbusters, triple A releases will certainly use it because they are sponsored by Nvidia (read: Nvidia pays devs to put those features in), but what about smaller studios? How many of them have Ray Tracing enabled features? Not a lot, because it’s hard to optimize for and worse, the performance hit the game will take won’t be worth the visuals it has. Meaning that once again, Nvidia created a feature set that won’t be used by a lot of people, even if they have RT-compliant GPUs. A lot of buzz over nothing, in my opinion.
I call it the new Gameworks because like Gameworks, it wasn’t made to democratize game development and visuals. It’s just another lame tool used by a trillion dollar company to enrich themselves even more. While I think that Ray Tracing has its uses (reflections are finally good), it’s mostly a gimmick that has been around for years, since 2018 in fact, and still has nothing to show for it.