I've been testing and reviewing PC hardware for 27 years now, and I still remember evaluating the GeForce 256 SDR and DDR graphics cards for the first time. Since then, I've tested countless GPUs, played countless games, and watched graphics technology evolve in fascinating ways.
Many trends and features have come and gone, but perhaps none has been more controversial than hardware-accelerated ray tracing, a technology that promised to revolutionize gaming nearly 8 years ago. So, based on everything we know today, was ray tracing actually a scam?
The year was 2018. Jensen Huang took the stage for an almost two-hour presentation, back when Nvidia was still primarily known as a graphics card company and long before it evolved into a multi-trillion-dollar AI powerhouse. Huang repeatedly emphasized that, with ray tracing, developers would no longer need to spend months "faking" lighting with shadow maps or reflection probes. By applying the laws of physics, the lighting would "just work."
He also claimed the GeForce RTX 20 series represented the biggest generational leap in the history of computer graphics, completely eclipsing Pascal. Best of all, pricing started at $499 for the RTX 2070. The message was clear: these were must-buy GPUs, ray tracing was the future, and once you experienced it, you wouldn't want to play games without it.
The problem is, none of this was true. To this day, ray tracing hasn't transformed gaming, and in my view, RTX 20 series buyers were sold a ray tracing fantasy. I'm not even sure we can say that most games released since then support ray tracing, and among those that do, the vast majority treat it as an optional feature rather than a core part of the experience.
The truth is, I was never fully sold on the ray tracing dream. When it comes to promised technologies, I've always been more of an "I'll believe it when I see it" kind of reviewer. With ray tracing, I really did need to see it, and even after seeing it, I have yet to believe it.
The RTX promise vs. reality
In the case of the GeForce RTX 20 series, the hardware simply wasn't powerful enough to properly deliver real-time ray tracing. The result was underwhelming RT effects paired with poor performance. Game support was also shockingly limited.
A year after launch, we could point to just two games where enabling ray tracing actually felt worthwhile: Metro Exodus and Control. A few other games supported RT at the time, but many implementations felt unimpressive, such as the noisy and largely pointless RT reflections in Battlefield V.
Although the ray tracing effects in those best-case examples were genuinely impressive, performance was still disappointing. If you wanted to play at over 60 fps, you often had to drop down to 1080p, something Nvidia tried to play off as perfectly fine by citing Steam survey data showing that most gamers still used 1080p displays.
We found that response unacceptable, especially given that the RTX 2060 Super, which was available when Nvidia gave us that answer, was largely considered a 1440p GPU. Yet when it came to ray tracing, 1440p performance was so far out of reach that most gamers wouldn't even consider it. Even at 1080p with medium RT settings enabled in a game like Control, performance fell well short of 60 fps, and at a cost of $400, I think most gamers would reasonably expect at least 60 fps at 1440p.
More expensive models like the $500 RTX 2080 (when xx80 series GPUs were sold for that kind of pricing) came nowhere close to delivering a consistent 60 fps experience at 1440p with ray tracing enabled.
Nvidia's other response to our criticism was to either reduce other graphics settings or enable DLSS. However, I struggled to understand why gamers would lower overall image quality just to turn on ray tracing. Nvidia heavily marketed ray tracing as a premium visual feature, something extra layered on top of already maxed-out graphics settings. Surely gamers weren't expected to switch to medium or low presets just to enable RT. That completely undermined the pitch.
As for enabling DLSS, yes, it improved frame rates when ray tracing was enabled, but it also improved frame rates when ray tracing was disabled. It's also important to remember that when Nvidia originally made these arguments, we were dealing with DLSS 1.0, which, frankly, was terrible.
The version of DLSS we recognize today didn't arrive until roughly 18 months after the RTX 20 series launched, and widespread adoption of DLSS 2.0 took even longer.
More importantly, upscaling never fundamentally closed that performance gap. Gamers still had to choose between significantly higher frame rates or ray tracing. On top of that, DLSS artifacts were much more noticeable at lower resolutions, and at the time we strongly recommended avoiding DLSS at 1080p because image quality was often poor.
So, a year after release, Nvidia could really only point to two games with ray tracing support where RTX 20 series owners should seriously consider enabling the feature: Metro Exodus and Control. The caveat was that most gamers would have to play at 1080p, and even then, hitting 60 fps was difficult without dropping to medium-quality settings, which we'd argue defeated the purpose of using ray tracing in the first place.
Ray tracing never made sense for competitive gaming
At this point, it started to become very clear that heavily weighting review recommendations around ray tracing support and performance was a poor choice. Many of the most popular games simply didn't benefit much from it, and this first became obvious with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, which introduced ray-traced shadows.
It was a nice enough feature for the single-player campaign, but for the multiplayer component, the part of the game designed to keep players engaged long term, ray tracing was effectively worthless and not something many gamers would actually enable.
Ray tracing also came to Fortnite, a game that can look visually spectacular but almost never does in competitive play regardless of your hardware. That's because the best way to play Fortnite is with Performance Mode enabled, a stripped-down visual preset designed to maximize frame rates and visibility.
So while ray tracing could provide an extra layer of immersion in single-player, story-driven games, it felt largely pointless in multiplayer titles, particularly fast-paced shooters. And it's not like GeForce RTX 20 series GPUs were going to magically become faster at ray tracing over time. If they struggled with the relatively modest RT effects available at launch, what chance did they have of handling the more advanced effects introduced years later?
That's exactly how things have played out. Even high-end RTX 20 and RTX 30 series GPUs struggle with modern path-traced workloads today.
For these reasons and more, I personally wasn't very excited about ray tracing. I was perfectly willing to accept that ray tracing represented the future of gaming, so the r/Nvidia crowd and I agreed on at least that much. But stuffing our reviews and recommendations full of ray tracing data wasn't something I was prepared to do, despite Nvidia's best efforts to push reviewers in that direction.
Calling out the marketing machine
Now, you might ask why I wasn't willing to drink the Kool-Aid and jump aboard the ray tracing train. Nvidia fans will say it's because we favor AMD, that we're Radeon shills. But if you're willing to do even a small amount of research, that narrative quickly falls apart.
We've regularly highlighted the superiority of Nvidia GPUs, often arguing that AMD needs to significantly undercut Nvidia on price in order to compete. We also criticize both AMD and Nvidia whenever it's warranted. The reality is we don't particularly care for either brand, and there's plenty of evidence supporting that.
The real reason I wasn't willing to buy into the ray tracing hype was simple: I've been doing this long enough to recognize marketing nonsense when I see it, and I knew what Nvidia was serving up with the RTX 20 series was heavily compromised. Those GPUs were never going to deliver meaningful levels of ray tracing performance. While some RTX 2060 owners were content playing Control at 1080p using medium settings with medium RT effects enabled at around 40 fps, that was a compromised experience and nowhere near what Nvidia originally promised.
In fact, we ran a feature about two years ago looking at how the RTX 2060 aged after six years of ray tracing development, and the results weren't pretty. We did our best to make it work, but even at 1080p in a game like Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, using the lowest possible quality preset, enabling ray tracing pushed the RTX 2060 well below 60 fps, and that was with DLSS Quality enabled.
But stepping away from single-player games like Control and Metro Exodus, ray tracing had a much bigger problem for me back in 2019, and it's a problem the technology still struggles with today. In many games, ray tracing simply feels pointless. It adds very little of value, and for that reason many gamers choose not to use it. Part of that comes down to the performance cost, but part of it also comes down to the visual changes it introduces.
In fact, it's not just about the type of game, but also the type of gamer. For example, when I played Shadow of the Tomb Raider, I had no interest in running the game at 1080p on an RTX 2060 at barely over 50 fps just to enable ray-traced shadows. Ideally, I wanted to play at over 120 fps.
To achieve that, I would reduce quality settings to hit my target frame rate, and only once I was comfortably above that target would I start increasing visual quality settings. But make no mistake, the priority was always frame rate, not visuals. Of course, not all gamers think this way. Some are perfectly happy gaming at 60 fps or lower and will prioritize visuals instead, which is completely fine.
But when it comes to multiplayer games, particularly fast-paced shooters, the majority of players prioritize frame rate, and this is where ray tracing has proven largely useless, even in 2026. Two years ago we polled our readers / viewers asking what their ideal target frame rate was for shooters, and the majority voted for more than 140 fps, which is exactly where I fall as well. More importantly, 88% of voters targeted at least 100 fps, and that's a difficult frame rate to maintain in many ray-traced games.
I think it's reasonable to say that back in 2018 we could imagine that by 2026 most major online shooters would use ray tracing by default. At that point, all modern GPUs would have supported the technology for years, and game engines would have evolved around it. But that isn't what happened. Ray tracing remains very much an optional feature, and because of that, most gamers continue choosing not to use it.
No one trying to win matches in Fortnite is enabling ray tracing, for example. Not only is the performance impact severe, but the additional visual effects can actually make enemy players harder to spot. So you end up handicapping yourself on two fronts: performance and visibility.
For a better representation of image quality comparisons, check out the HUB video below:
Having played competitive shooters and real-time strategy games for the better part of three decades, I always suspected ray tracing wasn't going to live up to the promises being made, at least not within the first several hardware generations.
And this isn't just my personal opinion. It's a widely held view among competitive gamers. When we asked viewers whether they prioritize frame rate or graphical quality in multiplayer games like Counter-Strike, Apex Legends, Valorant, Fortnite, Call of Duty, and Battlefield, the overwhelming majority voted for frame rate.
To that effect, I honestly can't remember the last time someone said to me, "Steve, I want to upgrade my PC so I can improve the visuals in Call of Duty." That's rarely the goal. Instead, it's usually something like, "Steve, what do I need to upgrade so I can comfortably stay above 200 fps in Fortnite using Performance Mode?" or whatever competitive game they're currently playing.
A feature that heavily reduces performance while simultaneously making enemy players harder to spot simply doesn't make much sense for competitive gaming. Now, I am sure that at some point in the future this will change, and eventually even multiplayer shooters will rely on ray tracing by default. But we're clearly not there yet.
Ray tracing is still a niche feature
Again, you might have expected that future to arrive by now, in 2026, because we've been hearing that "ray tracing is the future" for the past eight years. Yet it still feels like that future is at least another eight years away.
But even for single-player gamers, the ray tracing journey has been underwhelming so far. To date, there still aren't that many standout ray tracing titles you can point to, and even fewer that feel truly transformative. Worse still, the genuinely transformative examples require extremely high-end hardware, GPUs like the RTX 4090 and RTX 5090. This is still far from a mainstream technology. You're not realistically enjoying path tracing in Cyberpunk 2077 on an RTX 5060 Ti, at least not in any practical sense.
Given all that, it wasn't particularly surprising when, just two years ago, we asked you a simple question: when available, do you play with ray tracing enabled? Out of more than 50,000 votes, just 15% said yes, and only when using maximum settings, which tells you immediately that we're mostly talking about high-end GPU owners.
Another 7% said they enabled ray tracing using medium-to-low settings, while 26% said they sometimes used ray tracing depending on the game. That left 52% of voters saying they didn't use ray tracing at all, either because the visual improvements weren't noticeable enough or because the performance hit was simply too large to justify.
While writing this, I decided to recreate that poll to see whether sentiment had changed over the past two years. Unfortunately, YouTube no longer allows five polling options. Enshittification is apparently affecting YouTube polls now, too. Anyway, I combined the "no" responses into a single category. What's interesting is that the results barely changed.
The "Yes, maximum RT settings" crowd still represented 15% of voters, while another 7% said yes, but only with medium or low RT effects enabled. The majority said they use ray tracing in some games but not others, while the next-largest group said ray tracing simply isn't worth it.
So even after all this time, nearly 80% of gamers either only sometimes use ray tracing or don't use it at all. That's a pretty shocking result for a technology Nvidia claimed would revolutionize gaming.
The reality is that even many single-player gamers just want to enjoy the story and gameplay of the game they're playing. High quality visuals are nice and can absolutely add to the experience, but much of the enjoyment still comes from the gameplay itself. If enabling ray tracing makes a game harder to run, lowering frame rates and making the gameplay experience worse, then it's simply not going to be a winning feature.
Gamers wanted better performance, not more ray tracing
And this ties directly into what we're seeing with modern games today. GPUs have become incredibly expensive, upgrades are increasingly out of reach, and many gamers just want the titles they're interested in to run well on their existing hardware. There's also a growing sentiment that game visuals have kind of peaked.
Also read: Is Ray Tracing Worth the FPS Hit? 36 Game Performance Investigation
We constantly see comments from gamers saying they can't really tell the difference between RT on and off, or that games don't look substantially better today with fancy features like ray tracing than they did eight years ago before the tech first arrived.
That's in direct contradiction to what Jensen promised all those years ago. How could ray tracing truly be a must-have technology, something you should specifically spend more money on, if a sizable portion of gamers don't think the visual upgrade is noticeable enough to justify the performance hit?
And honestly, doesn't a lot of that marketing speak sound pretty questionable now when this is the state of ray tracing nearly eight years later? Where exactly is that promised future?
At some point, ray tracing probably will become a dominant feature that all gamers can comfortably use. But it feels like we've been hearing that same argument for years. It's always about the future, rarely about the present.
And this is where gamers who specifically bought a GPU for ray tracing basically got scammed. The early RT-enabled hardware is not powerful enough to play modern ray tracing games, and the games available during those GPUs' lifespan were mostly underwhelming. There were a few impressive tech-demo-like moments here and there, but for the most part those GPUs spent their lives rendering traditional rasterized graphics.
If you bought an RTX GPU primarily for multiplayer gaming, you've probably gotten burned even harder. None of today's popular multiplayer games are best played with RT enabled, it hurts performance, it makes the game harder, and there's no clear path to a future where ray tracing even makes sense in a multiplayer title.
Developers have spent the early years of the ray tracing era trying to get their games running on as many potato-tier GPUs as possible to maximize sales and player counts, rather than focusing heavily on cutting-edge visual features.
And then for single-player gamers, yeah, ray tracing can absolutely be a nice addition if you own a high-end GPU. But for the normies out there using mid-range hardware? If anything, the industry's push toward ray tracing has mostly just made games harder to run, often without any clear gameplay benefit, especially if smooth performance is your priority.
And despite the original pitch, has ray tracing really made games easier to develop? Because from where I'm sitting, all I see are development costs spiraling completely out of control, not the other way around.
Gaming increasingly feels like a battleground where companies like Nvidia push technologies that often benefit their own strategic interests more than the gamers buying the hardware, the customers who once sat at the center of the industry before attention shifted toward AI and data centers. And with that, I'm going to end this column here.