In 2018, Nvidia's Jensen Huang took the stage to unveil the GeForce RTX 20 series, promising that ray tracing would redefine interactive graphics. He described the hardware as the biggest generational leap in GPU history and assured gamers that lighting would "just work" thanks to physics-based simulation. The pitch was compelling: shadow maps and screen-space reflections were outdated tricks, and the new technology would deliver cinematic visuals in real-time. For those who bought into the vision, however, the experience over the following eight years has been deeply disappointing. This is the story of how ray tracing went from a revolutionary promise to a rarely used optional setting.
The Grand Promise of 2018
In the fall of 2018, Nvidia positioned the RTX 20-series as a must-buy for gamers. The RTX 2070 launched at $499, a price point that seemed reasonable for a new flagship feature. The company claimed that within a short time, most games would include ray tracing and that its effects would be so compelling that players would never want to go back. The RTX 20-series was also marketed as a huge jump over the Pascal architecture, emphasizing that ray tracing was not just an incremental addition but a fundamental shift in how games were rendered.
Nvidia's message was clear: buy now, because ray tracing is the future. Yet the future proved to be much further away than the marketing suggested. A year after launch, only two games, Metro Exodus and Control, had ray tracing implementations that felt worthwhile. Other launches, such as Battlefield V, featured noisy reflections that added little to the experience while severely affecting performance. The RTX 20-series simply lacked the compute power needed for real-time ray tracing at acceptable frame rates, even at 1080p. The $500 RTX 2080 could not deliver a consistent 60 fps at 1440p with ray tracing enabled, and the $400 RTX 2060 Super struggled to maintain playable frame rates in Control with medium RT settings.
Reality Check: Performance and Game Support
Nvidia's response to performance criticism was to suggest that gamers lower their graphics settings or enable DLSS. However, DLSS 1.0 at the time was widely panned for producing soft, blurry images, especially at 1080p. Upscaling technology had not yet matured, and recommending it as a solution to RT's performance problems felt disingenuous. More importantly, it did not close the performance gap; it merely made it somewhat easier to play at lower internal resolutions while upscaling back to native output.
Even with DLSS enabled, most PC owners avoided ray tracing because the visual benefits were often minor. Shadow of the Tomb Raider, for instance, launched with ray-traced shadows that were difficult to notice during normal gameplay. Enabling RT on an RTX 2060 reduced the average frame rate to just over 50 fps, and even then the game looked similar to the rasterized version. For many titles, the cost of ray tracing was too high relative to its visual payoff. The lack of a robust ecosystem of RT-supported games compounded the problem. For a technology that was supposed to transform the industry, the list of titles using it remained remarkably short eight years later.
The Competitive Gaming Mismatch
One of the biggest failures of ray tracing is its near-total inability to serve the competitive gaming community. Esports and fast-paced multiplayer shooters prioritise frame rate and visibility above all else. In games like Fortnite, Call of Duty, Valorant, and Counter-Strike, the most common setting among serious players is a performance mode that reduces visual quality to boost FPS to 140 or beyond. Enabling ray tracing in such a context is counterproductive. It lowers frame rates, increases input latency, and can make enemies blend into their surroundings because of realistic shadowing and reflections. A player who turns on RT in a competitive match is deliberately handicapping themself, which is why almost nobody does it.
As a result, ray tracing never became the default in the games that hold the largest player base. The technology works best in slow-paced, story-driven titles where visuals are more important than responsiveness. But even in those single-player experiences, the performance hit is often too steep for mid-range hardware. Most users with RTX 3060 or 4060 series GPUs are not going to turn on ray tracing if it forces them to play at 40 fps rather than a stable 80.
What the Polls Say
Public sentiment has remained remarkably stable over the past few years. A large-scale poll of PC enthusiasts conducted in 2024 found that only 15 percent of respondents always enable ray tracing, and nearly 80 percent used it only occasionally or never. Many voters cited the lack of a visible improvement, while others pointed to the severe performance cost. A follow-up poll created in 2026 produced nearly identical figures, confirming that widespread adoption is still a myth. Even among players with GPUs capable of running RT at high settings, many choose to leave it off because the visual change is not enough to justify the frame rate drop.
This is a crushing rebuttal to Nvidia's original claim that ray tracing would make games incomparably better. If the majority of players cannot distinguish the feature's output from a well-done rasterized presentation, then its value proposition collapses. The financial implications are also significant. High-end GPUs such as the RTX 4090 and 5090 are the only cards that can handle truly transformative path-traced scenes, and their prices put them out of reach for most consumers. Mainstream graphics cards, even those launching in 2026, still cannot provide a comfortable ray tracing experience in demanding AAA titles without heavy reliance on upscaling and frame generation.
Early Adopters Left Behind
Those who purchased the RTX 20-series specifically for ray tracing have been hit hardest. Early hardware that was expensive at launch is now completely obsolete in the context of ray tracing. A test of the RTX 2060 in a modern title with RT enabled showed that the card could barely reach 40 frames per second at its lowest settings and with DLSS active. This means that the promise made in 2018, that RTX 20-series owners would be ready for the future, never came to pass. The future arrived, but it required hardware that did not exist at the time.
The situation is not unique to early adopters. Even RTX 30-series cards struggle with modern, path-traced workloads, and owners of those cards must either upgrade or avoid the feature entirely. In an industry where GPU prices have skyrocketed, asking gamers to spend hundreds of dollars to enable a single visual effect that is difficult to notice is a hard sell. This is especially true when many recent game releases look nearly identical to titles launched eight years ago in their default settings.
Ray Tracing's Place in the Modern Landscape
It is not the technology itself that is a scam, but rather the way it was sold. Ray tracing is a legitimate rendering technique that produces
Source: TechSpot News