Ray tracing has been mainstream now for over five years, having originally debuted with the Nvidia RTX 20-series (Turing) graphics cards in 2018. Two successor GPU generations, the 30 (Ampere) and 40 series (Ada), have iterated on the technology and it has even found its way to the Xbox Series X and PS5 as well.
The goal of this real-time rendering technique is to deliver a more realistic and immersive approach to in-game lighting, reflections, and shadows. There’s no doubting that it’s impressive when it works, but the performance of modern games on both console and PCs using ray tracing means that it’s just not there yet for the vast majority of us.
