Before Nvidia introduced ray tracing in gaming with its launch of the GeForce RTX line in 2018, it was only used in big-budget movie studios. However, all AMD and Nvidia cards introduced since then come with real-time ray tracing that allows better-looking games.
While ray tracing improves the game’s visual quality, it significantly reduces the FPS even if you have the latest hardware. It can sometimes reduce the FPS by up to 90%, so it’s up to you if you want to sacrifice the game’s performance for better visuals (or chase the computing power for both).
While the revolutionary technology improves the quality of pictures, it doesn’t come without drawbacks. In particular, it affects the FPS, ultimately affecting your gaming experience. So should you have ray tracing on or off? Let’s take a look.
Does Ray Tracing Reduce FPS?
Ray tracing indeed reduces FPS because it needs more processing power. But to really understand why that happens, let’s first see what ray tracing is.
Understanding Ray Tracing
One of the most essential things for getting realistic 3D renders is good lighting. Shadows, good lights, and reflections are imperative.
And with ray tracing, you get things like the reflective and shiny look on water and other similar surfaces, making the overall 3D render look better.
In simpler words, ray tracing draws lines from the camera to the light source and bounces off different things in the scene. As a result, you get a better image than you do by using traditional techniques.
Ray tracing can simulate many optical effects, such as chromatic aberrations, motion blur, scattering, soft shadows, depth of field, reflection, and refraction. And in addition to light, it can simulate sound.
How Ray Tracing Affects FPS
While ray tracing does improve image quality, it’s not entirely accurate and may not apply to all games. Furthermore, some games look much worse if ray tracing is turned on. This is because it can’t just make any game appear hyperrealistic.
Instead, it mostly depends on how the textures and art are designed and how ray tracing is implemented. It’ll make all things related to light and reflection indeed rendered and not estimated.
For instance, if a game has ranged weapons, it most likely has raycasts in-built to detect collisions. Depending on the frame rate, these detect the distance a projectile moves in a specific time period.
So it takes numerous raycasts from a particular light source and renders light using these as a reference. Since it needs a lot of processing power, it affects the FPS significantly. If you have dedicated hardware, it might reduce your FPS by just half, but without it, it may reduce it by up to 90%.
Is it Better to Have Ray Tracing on or off?
In gaming, ray tracing (in real-time) combines traditional rasterized graphics and ray tracing. It works by rasterizing basic strictures first, and then the GPU computes light effects like shadows and reflections using ray tracing.
Since it combines both excellent rendering speed and good image quality, ray tracing fixes shading and lighting issues. But at the same time, we can’t deny it affects the game’s performance. This is why keeping ray tracing off or on is a personal preference.
But perhaps looking at the benefits and drawbacks can help you decide better.
Benefits of Ray Tracing
The biggest benefit of ray tracing is you get photorealistic results, making it great for narratives since they allow you to provide more context and give a better picture to tell the story more convincingly.
Ray tracing also makes sure you have a more immersive experience. Games look more cinematic and magnificent, and you get to create more artistic visuals.
Drawbacks of Ray Tracing
The biggest drawback of ray tracing is its high computational cost, so it might not be possible for all gamers to get it. And it’s costly, so cards supporting ray tracing aren’t affordable. So it’s much better to get a previous-gen card that costs less.
Plus, it takes quite a lot of time to render, which affects the FPS. And in first-person shooter games, in particular, a high frame rate is critical to stay alive.
Even with the latest hardware, ray tracing will decrease the frame rate. In some cases, it might drop it from 100 to 60 FPS if you turn it on.
And even though ray tracing ensures magnificent images, its boost in games isn’t very significant. So the difference in image quality might not be worth the performance loss.