What Is Ray Tracing? (And What It Means for PC Gaming)
Ray tracing, a sophisticated technique for drawing realistic graphics in video games, has gone mainstream. Today it's even available on entry-level graphics hardware.
Noticed your eyes widening a lot more when you play games lately? If so, that may be because many games now support ray tracing, a technology that's become possible in real-time since only 2018, thanks to specialized graphics hardware.
Though ray tracing is commonly discussed in terms of PC gaming, Microsoft's Xbox Series X and Sony's PlayStation 5 also have the necessary hardware and a growing library of games that support it. This article explains how ray tracing differs from traditional rasterization and why it's important for the future of gaming, whether on a console, a gaming desktop, or a gaming laptop.