Ray tracing has become a major selling point for the latest consoles and high-end PC graphics cards, but it comes at a significant performance cost. According to an Engadget analysis, enabling ray tracing in modern AAA titles can reduce average frame rates by 20 to 40 percent, with some games like Hitman 3 seeing a 65 percent drop. That makes the feature a luxury for gamers with powerful rigs, while those on older or mid-range GPUs are better off disabling it to maintain smooth gameplay.
This performance gap has business implications for the PC gaming market. The Engadget piece notes that the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 currently holds the highest usage share in the Steam Hardware Survey, indicating that a growing segment of dedicated PC players are investing in graphics cards capable of handling ray tracing. At the same time, the article advises against enabling ray tracing on GPUs that are a couple of generations old, which could influence upgrade cycles and purchasing decisions.
The article also distinguishes ray tracing from path tracing, a more advanced technique that controls an entire game's lighting and is even more taxing on hardware. Path tracing remains limited to a handful of titles and is only practical on top-tier cards like the RTX 5080 or 5090. For the broader market, the high cost of these features suggests that visual fidelity will continue to be a differentiator for premium hardware, while mainstream gamers may prioritize frame rate over realism. The source does not present competing viewpoints, but it does emphasize that the value of ray tracing depends heavily on the user's hardware{