Ray tracing is used to give physically-accurate real-time lighting and reflections by simulating the bouncing of light through an environment. Without ray tracing, games have to fake things like sunlight illuminating a room through a window, or mirrors, puddles and other reflective surfaces.
The thing is, games have become really good at faking those things, so for a lot of people the difference is only noticeable when viewing side-by-side comparisons, and not really when actually playing in-game.
Ray tracing could be much more than just better lighting and reflections, but it's still a niche capability for enthusiasts with high-end gear. We won't really see the full potential of ray tracing until it becomes standard for the majority of gamers which is years away.
Neoptolemus85 t1_izym4g4 wrote
Reply to comment by makedesign in AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT / XTX review: 4K performance for less | AMD’s top RDNA 3 GPU manages to beat the RTX 4080 in many games at a $200 lower price. But ray-tracing performance is far behind Nvidia. by chrisdh79
Ray tracing is used to give physically-accurate real-time lighting and reflections by simulating the bouncing of light through an environment. Without ray tracing, games have to fake things like sunlight illuminating a room through a window, or mirrors, puddles and other reflective surfaces.
The thing is, games have become really good at faking those things, so for a lot of people the difference is only noticeable when viewing side-by-side comparisons, and not really when actually playing in-game.
Ray tracing could be much more than just better lighting and reflections, but it's still a niche capability for enthusiasts with high-end gear. We won't really see the full potential of ray tracing until it becomes standard for the majority of gamers which is years away.