In brief: Nvidia launched its push toward hardware-accelerated ray tracing in 2018 with its GeForce RTX 20 series graphics cards, promoting the technology as a defining feature of next-gen gaming. However, a look at today's most popular PC games shows that – nearly eight years later – it remains far from ubiquitous.
PC Gamer recently noted that, among the 21 most popular PC games of 2025, only five make use of hardware-accelerated ray tracing. While the demanding technology is gaining traction in visually ambitious AAA titles, it has yet to trickle down to games optimized for mainstream hardware.
It is unsurprising that popular titles with lightweight visuals skip ray tracing, including Dispatch, Hollow Knight: Silksong, REPO, Counter-Strike 2, Valorant, and Peak. More notable, however, is its absence from several high-profile, graphically intensive games such as Stellar Blade, Split Fiction, and Nioh 3. Monster Hunter Wilds, which became notorious for its performance issues, only uses ray tracing for reflections.
Some franchises have even stepped back from ray tracing. Battlefield V was one of the first games to support ray tracing, yet Battlefield 6 omitted it seven years later. FromSoftware's Elden Ring Nightreign also lacks ray tracing despite its inclusion in the original Elden Ring.
The Call of Duty series removed ray tracing after 2020's Black Ops Cold War, later restoring reflections in Black Ops 7 multiplayer and adding the more demanding path tracing to lobbies in Warzone 2.0 and Modern Warfare III.
Implementing ray tracing in areas where players customize cosmetics (such as menus and lobbies) is likely easier for developers than manually baking lighting and shadows for every possible configuration. Ubisoft has cited this reasoning to explain why the customizable hideout is the only area in Assassin's Creed Shadows with mandatory ray tracing. FromSoftware likely enables ray tracing in Armored Core VI's garage mode for similar reasons.
Although the adoption of hardware-accelerated ray tracing has been limited, software-based global illumination which can be considered a form of ray tracing is far more common. This is largely because Unreal Engine 5, now the dominant engine for AAA development, includes Lumen global illumination as a standard feature.
Still, most developers only rely on Lumen's software-based implementation, which produces less impressive results and shifts much of the rendering workload from the GPU to the CPU. A notable exception is one of the most popular games in the world: Fortnite – which Epic Games uses as both a test bed and a showcase for UE5 features.
The hesitation to fully embrace hardware-accelerated ray tracing is understandable. Many developers still view the performance cost as unjustified, especially since most consumer hardware outside mid-range and high-end Nvidia GPUs does not prioritize ray tracing performance. AMD graphics cards only reached parity in this area with its latest RDNA 4 architecture, which remains limited to hard-to-find desktop models.
Also see: Is Ray Tracing Worth the FPS Hit? 36 Game Performance Investigation
In addition, most AAA titles are designed around console hardware, where ray tracing support was a late addition to older RDNA 2-based chips. Even so, recent and upcoming technologies suggest that a broader shift may be approaching.
Epic's demonstrations of newer Unreal Engine 5 builds have emphasized a push toward achieving 60 fps with hardware-accelerated ray tracing on the standard PlayStation 5. Two recent idTech-powered releases: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and Doom: The Dark Ages, have reached similar targets while also enabling path tracing on PC. Capcom's upcoming Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata might accomplish the same feat.
Over the next few years, next-generation consoles, desktops, laptops, and handhelds powered by RDNA 5 could establish a new baseline, offering significantly improved ray tracing and path tracing performance. Whether these devices will be affordable remains uncertain, however, as tariffs and ongoing memory shortages have already driven price increases and delays.
The most popular PC games still rarely use hardware ray tracing
