Graphics Cards With Ray Tracing: The Best Options
Ray tracing, the feature heavily promoted by Nvidia in its 30-series graphics card lineup, is the latest and greatest modern graphics advancement. It's becoming more prominent in modern games, and it's so beloved by the gaming community that ray tracing is being added to older games through mods. Now, offerings from both AMD and Nvidia provide support for ray tracing on a variety of cards at different price points. That is, if one is available. Nearly two years after Nvidia's 30-series cards were unveiled, the microchip shortage has caused plummeting supply and skyrocketing demand.
Gamers are rushing to buy graphics cards with ray tracing enabled, what even is it? In essence, the feature is a new — and much more complicated way — of interpreting light in graphics. In real life, light naturally reflects off of surrounding objects to create a natural feel. When playing a video game, light has been traditionally more uniform instead of conforming to natural reflections. Ray tracing offers the capability of «tracing» the expected natural paths of light and recreating them graphically. With the feature enabled, most people will notice more natural lighting in video games; however, it comes at a performance cost, as predicting and recreating light paths (and their shadows) requires immense processing power.
Related: PS5 Graphics Modes: What Ray Tracing Actually Means
The best graphics cards with ray tracing are the most expensive ones, but there are more cost-effective options to ray tracing than the flagships. From Nvidia, the entire RTX 30 Series lineup supports ray tracing at various performance levels. The company's RTX 3090 graphics card is the best — and most expensive — option, but the RTX 3080 offers strong ray tracing
Read more on screenrant.com
