3 reasons why ray tracing is here to stay

Ray tracing is much more than just a marketing term in 2025. Most games released these days have RT features in them; reflection and lighting have always been difficult for game developers to get right, and ray tracing helps by doing a lot of the heavy lifting for them. It still has to be implemented correctly, and a lot of titles just don’t justify the performance tax it places on your system. Among gamers, it hasn’t always been popular, but here are 3 reasons why ray tracing isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

3

NVIDIA has put all their eggs in this basket

R-T-X: it’s in the name

When NVIDIA launched its RTX 20-series GPUs, it was putting all its eggs into the ray tracing basket. Renaming your extremely successful product line to reflect a new technology is already a dicey thing to do, but it was even riskier considering RT wasn’t implemented in games yet. Almost no titles had ray-traced features, and the ones that did were delaying them to post-release updates. NVIDIA was selling a product line on a promise, and it did not deliver. Even the flagship 2080 Ti was woefully inadequate in ray tracing demos, and was quickly trounced by next-generation cards.

All of that is to say: NVIDIA isn’t giving up on RT anytime soon. They’ve sunk a lot of resources into ray tracing and continue to do so. While the initial promise may have held no water in retrospect, they continue to be the standard for RT performance over Radeon. It’s yet to be seen how this shakes out in the next-gen RX 9000 and RTX 50-series cards, but NVIDIA looks poised to continue their reign as kings of RT. Intel is also undoubtedly putting a ton of resources into making Arc GPUs perform well in RT.

Related

2 reasons why you should buy an Intel Arc GPU instead of AMD or Nvidia

Team Blue is offering some enticing GPUs for gamers.

2

Game developers have begun to bake in ray tracing

Barring another innovation, it’s not going anywhere

With the ever-increasing graphical demand in games, NVIDIA continues to put more and more emphasis on RT, to the point where game developers are now baking it into their games. For example, AAA titles like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and Star Wars Outlaws don’t give players the ability to turn ray tracing features off.

Obviously, this isn’t a good thing, considering there’s still wild variability in how well RT is implemented from game to game. The onus is mostly on the developer to make it run well on a wide range of hardware. DLSS and other upscaling technology can help a bit, but it’s still in a state where it might not always look good, just different. Nonetheless, the fact that we’re seeing it baked in with no option to turn it off means it’s here to stay, at least for now.

Related

3 reasons why right now is the worst time to upgrade your GPU

Waiting just a little while longer will pay dividends for your future GPU upgrade

1

It’s just starting to get good now

RT looks and performs much better than it did on launch

Despite the fact that game developers are baking RT into games, playing last-gen titles with more up-to-date hardware results in a great RT experience. This is, if nothing else, an encouraging sign that the hardware is at least improving. The gains seen from generation to generation on modern titles have been slow but steady as well.

Again, it heavily depends on the developer and their implementation, but certain games do genuinely look great with ray tracing enabled. Alan Wake 2, Control, and of course Cyberpunk 2077 are prime examples. There are, of course, some titles where the only way you can tell whether RT is on is if your FPS is halved, but these situations are becoming a bit more infrequent as time goes on.

Related

Is ray tracing even worth it in 2025?

Ray tracing is over 6 years old now, but it’s still pointless for the majority of gamers

Ray tracing isn’t going anywhere

Whether you like it or not, ray tracing has become a permanent fixture in PC gaming, and will continue to be utilized in titles for years to come. RT isn’t just for new games, though; classic titles like Portal have had ray tracing features retrofitted to them, breathing new life into critically acclaimed titles. Even Half-Life 2 is getting some ray-traced TLC, which got some airtime during NVIDIA’s RTX 50-series announcement.