# Ray tracing: beautiful but brutal on your frame rate

> Gaming's most advanced lighting technique looks stunning but demands expensive hardware and costs serious performance.
- Title: Ray tracing: beautiful but brutal on your frame rate
- Summary: Gaming's most advanced lighting technique looks stunning but demands expensive hardware and costs serious performance. Ray tracing simulates realistic…
- Keywords: ray tracing, pc gaming, graphics cards, nvidia, amd, frame rate, path tracing, dlss, technology, Ray, tracing, beautiful
- Source: Engadget — https://engadget.com/2279929/what-is-ray-tracing-gaming-does-it-make-difference
- Author: Dave Meikleham
- Published: 2026-10-10T18:00:00+00:00
- Read time: 2 min
- Topics: ray tracing, pc gaming, graphics cards, nvidia, amd, frame rate, path tracing, dlss, technology
## The current generation finally handles ray tracing
Sony and Microsoft's PS5 and Xbox Series X can provide moderate ray-traced experiences, but high-end PC rigs offer the most advanced ray tracing features with incredible fidelity.
## Ray tracing demands serious hardware
If your GPU is more than five years old, any ray-traced games will likely perform poorly. Ray tracing is a luxury feature that should only be turned on with a fairly high-end rig.
## What ray tracing actually does
Ray tracing is an advanced rendering technique that simulates realistic lighting effects, shadows and reflections more accurately than old-school rasterization methods by bouncing rays around the screen.
## Most PC gamers should skip ray tracing
For folks gaming on an RTX 3060 or AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT, ray tracing is not recommended. Focus instead on locking down a stable frame rate at your monitor's native resolution.
## Ray tracing tanks your frame rate
TechSpot analyzed ray tracing across thirty-six different games. Average FPS dropped between twenty to forty percent when ray tracing was on, with some games dropping far more.
## Some games suffer brutal performance hits
Hogwarts Legacy saw a forty-five percent frame rate dip. Alan Wake two dropped around fifty-two percent. Hitman three's average frame rate drops by an absurd sixty-five percent.
## Path tracing is ray tracing's more powerful cousin
Path tracing is a more advanced type of ray tracing that can calculate far more lighting sources. It usually controls the entire look of a game, leading to a more consistently lit image.
## Path tracing is even more demanding
Path tracing is even more brutally taxing on frame rates than traditional ray tracing. Enabling path tracing can be fifty percent more demanding than ray tracing depending on the scene.

> Unless you're lucky enough to own an RTX 5090 or RTX 5080, you're best off steering well clear of the gorgeous but performance-punishing tech.
## Key takeaway

Ray tracing simulates realistic lighting but cuts frame rates by twenty to sixty-five percent, making it viable only for high-end PC gamers with recent graphics cards.