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It’s remarkable to think that real-time ray tracing hasn’t been around for a decade yet, and yet you can already see clear distinctions between the technology’s initial support and the widespread, in-depth implementations it enjoys now in modern video games. What started as a way for Nvidia to sell new graphics cards has become an entirely fundamental shift in how various parts of video games are rendered, providing a level of level of visual upgrades that can truly make a difference when used intelligently.
But just what is ray tracing? It’s not something that can quickly be explained, but you can imagine it as a system that more accurately simulates the interactions of light within a scene. In the past, convincing lighting and reflections have either been done by meticulously crafted baked lighting or cube map reflections, sometimes leaning on features such as screen-space information (information objects can provide to, say, a reflective puddle of water, as long as that object stays within view). Like anything trying to simulate real life, there are limitations to what scenarios can be accounted for, leading to oddities in reflections and light bleed if you know how to look for them. Ray tracing solves this to a degree. Light can now bounce between objects in a scene, whether they’re within view or not, and use that to accurate interact with other objects around you. A red light, for example, can now communicate to a nearby metal that it needs to be reflected, and reflected with a certain hue too. That’s a rudimentary example of how this incredibly complex technology works and doesn’t even begin to go into the differences between ray tracing and path tracing, but you can read more about both here.
What’s far more important is ray tracing’s effect on games. You don’t need to explore open world games like Spider-Man 2 or Ghostwire: Tokyo for long before noticing the crisp reflections in rain-slicked roads you’re walking on or thousands of skyscraper windows you’re whizzing past. It doesn’t have to be a massive world either; the captivating office spaces of Control are made so much more believable with translucent office windows reflecting and refracting the environment around them, while the hallways of each test chamber in Portal finally exude a level of creepy cleanliness that the original only managed through imagination. Technological marvels such as Cyberpunk 2077 brings everything full circle, with an array of different ray tracing technologies and even patch tracing support that radically transform the detail that Night City and its neon-drench streets is able to offer. Contrast that with Minecraft and you can see that it the technology isn’t just for games targeting photorealism — ray tracing has a lot to offer wherever lighting is involved, and that’s pretty much everywhere.
Here are what we consider some of the best games with ray tracing, covering a wide range of implementation types and showcasing the best examples of how this technology can enhance your experience.
