According to XDA-Developers, Nvidia brought real-time ray tracing to consumer GPUs with the RTX 20 series seven years ago in 2018. Today, despite four generations of GPUs from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel, the performance penalty for enabling it remains high, requiring at least a mid-range GPU like an RTX 4070 Super or RX 9070 for decent 1440p gaming. Modern ray-traced titles are so demanding that upscaling (DLSS/FSR) and frame generation are now mandatory, not optional, introducing visual artifacts and latency. The article notes that only a handful of titles, like Cyberpunk 2077 and Alan Wake 2, justify the “ray tracing tax,” while many 2025 games like Battlefield 6 are launching without it. Ultimately, for the majority of gamers playing across various genres, the technology still isn’t worth the heavy financial and performance overheads.
The unaffordable tax
Here’s the thing that gets me: we’re told every new generation that hardware will finally “solve” ray tracing. But it hasn’t. The goalposts just keep moving. The RTX 4090 could handle the ray tracing of 2020, but then games like Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty or Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora came along and brought even top-tier cards to their knees. So you’re stuck in this endless upgrade cycle chasing a feature that, frankly, often provides diminishing visual returns. The article is right—it’s a rich man’s game. And it’s not just the GPU cost; it’s the whole ecosystem. You need a powerful CPU to avoid bottlenecking those AI frames, a high-refresh-rate monitor to see the benefit, and maybe even a G-Sync module to smooth it all out. The total system cost is astronomical for what? Slightly more accurate puddles?
The crutches are now required
This is my biggest gripe. Ray tracing was sold as a premium visual feature. But now, to even use it at a playable frame rate, you have to enable two other technologies that degrade the visual experience or feel. Upscaling is amazing, but it’s not native. You get shimmering, ghosting, and weird artifacts in motion—issues that are antithetical to a “premium” image. And frame generation? It’s a latency nightmare for anything remotely twitchy. It’s like buying a sports car that only drives smoothly if you put it on a train. You’re not actually experiencing the raw performance you paid for; you’re experiencing a simulation of it. So you’ve spent a thousand dollars on a GPU to not run the game natively. Let that sink in.
Do we even need it?
The most damning point from the source is how few games truly need it. Think about it. Most of the canonical examples are years old: Control, Metro Exodus. And while new showpieces exist, many of the most visually stunning games of recent years achieved their look with incredibly clever rasterization and baked lighting. Ghost of Tsushima is breathtaking. The Dead Space remake is horrifically immersive. They did it without tanking your framerate. This tells us that artistic direction and skilled development often matter more than brute-force physics accuracy. When a technology’s main justification is that it’s more “correct,” but not necessarily more “beautiful” or “fun,” you have to question its core value proposition for gamers.
A future of two tracks
So where does this leave us? I think we’re heading for a permanent split. On one track, you’ll have the cinematic, single-player “experience” titles that will use ray tracing (and path tracing) as a flagship marketing bullet, designed to sell $1200 GPUs and tech YouTube videos. On the other track, which includes most multiplayer games, esports titles, and even many big-budget open-world games, developers will continue to optimize for rasterization. They’ll use clever tricks and software-based solutions to get 95% of the visual effect for 20% of the performance cost. Why? Because they want people to actually play their game. Until the performance hit disappears—and I mean truly disappears without needing AI crutches—ray tracing will remain a niche enthusiast feature, not the revolutionary standard it was promised to be. And honestly, that’s probably fine for most of us.
