With the launch of the GeForce RTX 20 series in 2018, Nvidia set the stage for hardware-accelerated ray tracing as a flagship feature of modern graphics. However, almost eight years later, adoption across today’s leading PC titles remains limited.
A recent analysis from PC Gamer found that just five of the 21 most-played PC games of 2025 support hardware-accelerated ray tracing. While the feature is becoming more common in big-budget AAA releases, it has yet to see widespread adoption in titles built for mainstream systems.
It’s no surprise that visually lightweight hits such as Dispatch, Hollow Knight: Silksong, REPO, Counter-Strike 2, Valorant, and Peak skip ray tracing. What is a bit surprising is the absence of ray tracing effects like Stellar Blade, Split Fiction, and Nioh 3. Even Monster Hunter Wilds, a game widely criticized for its performance problems.
Some franchises have quietly moved away from the technology. Battlefield V was among the earliest titles to adopt ray tracing, yet Battlefield 6 launched seven years later without it. In a similar shift, Elden Ring Nightreign does not feature ray tracing, despite its presence in Elden Ring.
The Call of Duty franchise has taken an uneven approach to ray tracing. After fully supporting the feature in Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, later entries dropped it altogether. Reflections eventually returned to multiplayer in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, while Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III introduced the more demanding path tracing in their lobby environments.
Using ray tracing in cosmetic-focused spaces, like menus or lobbies, is often simpler than baking lighting for every possible character or gear combination. Ubisoft has said that’s why only the customizable hideout in Assassin’s Creed Shadows requires it. FromSoftware likely had the same idea when adding ray tracing to the garage mode in Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon.
Although hardware-accelerated ray tracing remains relatively uncommon, software-based global illumination is widely used. Much of that momentum comes from Unreal Engine 5, which has become a standard tool for AAA development and includes Lumen global illumination as a built-in system.
Even so, most studios stick with Lumen’s software-based mode, which delivers more modest visual gains and moves a significant portion of the workload from the GPU to the CPU. One prominent outlier is Fortnite, frequently used by Epic Games as a proving ground for Unreal Engine 5 technologies.
The slow adoption of hardware-accelerated ray tracing makes sense from a development standpoint. Many studios question whether the performance cost is worth it, especially since most consumer GPUs, beyond mid-range and high-end models from Nvidia, are not optimized for ray tracing. AMD achieved comparable performance with its RDNA 4 architecture, though it is currently limited to relatively scarce desktop offerings.
Additionally, most AAA games are built with consoles in mind, where ray tracing was introduced relatively late on older RDNA 2-based hardware.
Nevertheless, recent innovations and upcoming developments suggest the industry could be nearing a more significant inflection point.
Recent showcases from Epic Games highlight efforts to deliver 60 fps with hardware-accelerated ray tracing on the base PlayStation 5. Meanwhile, idTech-powered titles such as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and Doom: The Dark Ages have hit comparable performance marks, while also offering path tracing on PC. Upcoming releases from Capcom, including Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata, could follow suit.
Over the next few years, new consoles, PCs, laptops, and handhelds running on RDNA 5 might set a whole new standard for ray tracing and path tracing. The big unknown is price, especially with tariffs and memory shortages already causing delays and driving costs up.
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