I was obsessed with real-time ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077, until playing it on an older laptop delivered a sorely needed slap to the face

pcgamer.com:

For a long time, no matter how hard I tried, and no matter how much of a performance hit my framerate took in Cyberpunk 2077, I just couldn't bring myself to play without real-time ray tracing toggled on.

It got even worse when Overdrive Mode arrived. What's that?! Even more pretty lighting effects with an even greater impact on my framerate? Sold.

Nvidia's Ray Reconstruction feature helped produce slightly better performance, but did nothing for the underlying issue that, while I could be playing this game at over 100 fps without ray tracing turned on, here I was chugging away around 30fps (and at times, god forbid, under 30fps).

Real-time ray tracing is well good, though, am I right? And there's no better showcase than Cyberpunk 2077, which has very much been a testbed for Nvidia's wizzy graphics tech. As someone who has been PC gaming since the mid-1990s, I'm genuinely astounded at how good this game looks with ray tracing turned on.

I've had plenty of graphical 'Wow!' moments in my time. From Outcast's expansive Voxel Engine-powered worlds and gorgeous glimmering pools of water, through to Crysis' jaw-dropping fidelity and atmospheric effects. However, it's fair to say that Cyberpunk 2077 with all its graphical bells and whistles turned on is on another level. It's just a shame that you need a god-tier expensive rig to enjoy it at a framerate north of 60fps.

Regardless, I couldn't exactly not turn ray tracing on now could I? If the option is there to make my PC game look better then I'm going to take it, right? I imagine this is a struggle that a lot of other PC gamers are familiar with. The allure of pretty graphics and graphical effects, like the dark side of the Force, can be very powerful, even if it is at a