Path tracing has been back on the PC hardware agenda recently, with Nvidia’s sales pitch for the GeForce RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 more than lightly based on how good they are at shotgunning this premium graphics tech down your eye stalks. Yet beyond the sparkling glamour of marketing slides, however, path tracing remains exceptionally niche: nearly six years since Quake II RTX served as the tech’s de facto gaming debut, you can still count the number of compatible games on your fingers. Compare and contrast with the dozens upon dozens of games that have embraced ray tracing, path tracing’s less demanding nephew, and you’ll likely start wondering why more game devs don’t go for it.
We’re not here to answer that, though. This is Should You Bother With, here to investigate whether you should start using path traced effects to give your games – some of them, anyway – the full maxed-out-visuals treatment. Even if it takes a graphics card upgrade to do so.
The natural place to start is with a explanation of what path tracing actually is. Like ray tracing, it’s a method of producing more realistic (or, at least, more visually striking) lighting, shadow, and reflection effects, involving the real-time tracing of light rays from the game’s camera to their intended light sources. Both are more computationally intensive than how games more typically present lighting effects, but ray tracing still limits itself by only tracing one ray per pixel and calculating a small number of secondary rays should the light hit a reflective surface. Path tracing is the “Sure, go nuts” version, generating multiple rays per pixel and allowing them to bounce around surfaces randomly until they either find a light source or hit a set bounce limit.
This eats up yet more processing power, but what you end up with is basically a model for how all the light in a scene should behave – not just specific rays. In theory, this makes for more realistic effects that are more reactive to real-time changes. It’s also why path tracing is sometimes called “full ray tracing”, as the principles of ray tracing are being applied to the entire image as opposed to very specific light sources and effects.
Applied with aplomb, path tracing can deliver the kind of visual overhaul that you rarely see outside of dumping half of NexusMods onto a Bethesda RPG. Take a look at how much it changes Cyberpunk 2077, even compared to the Psycho ray tracing preset:
Granted, on an individual level, some changes work better than others. The wet pavements look nicer with path tracing, for sure – with ray tracing, these can have an ugly grainy effect when you’re moving, which then abruptly smooths out as soon as you’re standing still. Bit weird. Path tracing gives them a more consistent, less patchy look that ultimately works better with the aesthetic.
The overall lighting presentation, however, becomes simultaneously much brighter and much warmer, which I’m not sure suits the grungy crime vibe so well. There’s also a sense that the light sources themselves are overegging it – that neon sign is barely legible with path tracing.
Fellow path tracee Alan Wake 2 – which has just had its ray tracing enhanced with RTX Mega Geometry support – opts for a subtler approach. In these shots, the visible benefits over standard RT are mainly just the shinier car bonnet and the cleaner puddle reflections. But, during an earlier section – while traipsing through the woods as Saga – I did notice a touch more detail to shadows, which responded more authentically to both myself and various leaves and tree branching moving around within torches and spotlights.
Since I was playing these games on a GeForce RTX GPU, they’ve also been touched up further by DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction, which uses (what else?) AI to improve detailing, reduce visual noise, and slightly speed up the performance of path tracing settings. Still, do either of these make a convincing sell for this being must-have tech? Maybe not so much. Cyberpunk 2007 just gets too bright and bold for my tastes, and while Alan Wake 2 is a more straight-up improvement, a lot of the upgrades (like the more detailed shadows on that street litter, or the spookier forest shadows) are barely distinguishable from the plain old Ultra ray tracing setting.
To do a bit of BBC-ish journalistic balance, I would like to bring up a use of path tracing I really like: Portal with RTX. This Valve-approved, Nvidia-developed remaster of the original Portal combines new textures with fully path-traced lighting and shadows, which makes for some gorgeous effects while staying true to Aperture Science’s clinical-yet-dingy design.
I’ll admit, however, that part of the reason it showcases path tracing so well is that there isn’t a standard ray tracing mode to compare it too – you can only play with path tracing. It’s also utterly brutal to run, which brings us to another, bigger problem with path tracing: performance.
You probably saw this coming. Even if path tracing only makes minor improvements over ray tracing, it can and will impose a much bigger levy on the game’s performance, and ray tracing is already a practiced taxman. I tested three recent graphics cards at their typical monitor resolutions – the RTX 4060 for 1080p, the RTX 4070 Ti for 1440p, and the RTX 5080 for 4K – and all three of them suffered heavily in the aforementioned three games, sometimes dipping below 30fps even with help from DLSS upscaling.
(Cyberpunk 2077 and Alan Wake 2 tested using DLSS 4’s new Transformer model, Portal with RTX using the original Convolutional Neural Networks model)
Path tracing can quite happily cut average performance by 50% or more, and again, that’s just on these new (or newish) GPUs. Older but still widely-used cards like the RTX 3060 aren’t going to cut it. And if they did, does path tracing make a game look more than 50% prettier? Not unless it’s remaking an old classic, no.
Those big, blue bars do point towards a possible workaround to this leaden quality, with the RTX 40 series able to call upon DLSS 3 frame generation to push framerates back into not-bad territory. The RTX 5080, meanwhile, can deploy DLSS 4’s Multi Frame Generation (MFG) for an even bigger boost.
Problem solved? Not quite. As I recently lectured Monster Hunter Wilds about, frame generation isn’t supposed to cover up framerate deficiencies by simply making up the numbers. It is supposed to make smooth-running games look even better by building on a solid (i.e., fast) base of frames that the PC is capable of rendering itself. This distinction is important because half the reason low framerates suck, outside of the visual element, is that the on-screen image is less frequently reflecting your control inputs. Hence the molasses feel, and why higher-framerate games have less input lag. Not only do generated frames fail to reduce this latency – because they come from outside the PC’s main rendering pipeline, and thus don’t take control inputs into account – but they actively add to it. The result is that while Alan Wake 2 on the RTX 5080 looks great when it’s hitting 124fps with path tracing, it still feels like it’s running at 36fps, with all the sluggishness that entails.
There is an element of history repeating itself, here. When ray tracing first became a possibility in games, back alongside the RTX 20 series GPU launch in 2018, it could only do so by necessitating DLSS upscaling to absorb the performance hit. Now, whenever a game gets path tracing, it’s usually necessitating frame generation for the same reason. Except upscaling, especially DLSS, never came with tradeoffs and drawbacks to the degree that frame gen does, which in turn makes the associated path tracing a harder sell.
As does, to return to an earlier point, the lack of games that support it. In terms of full, original games, current releases only span Cyberpunk 2077, Alan Wake 2, Black Myth: Wukong, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, with Teardown and Portal-inspired puzzler Desordre providing some indie rep. Arguably Star Wars Outlaws as well, which uses a very path tracing-like lighting system called RTX Direct Illumination, while MMORPG Justice has it but isn’t available on PC in the West.
Otherwise, it’s just mods like Quake II RTX and Portal with RTX, and that’s not to poo-poo them – I’m definitely keen on checking on Half-Life 2 RTX when it eventually releases. Still, a bulging catalogue it is not. And even if you’re willing to upgrade your PC to something that can run path tracing, there’s a serious question of whether you’d get your money’s worth.
Should you bother with path tracing? Probably not. Even ray tracing’s prettiness-to-performance ratio isn’t always favourable, and path tracing exacerbates the problem, so I can’t recommend you out go out and buy RTX 5090 to enjoy the more reactive shadows cast by Keanu Reeves’ beard hairs. Not when it’s this hard on your hardware, and when only a tiny proportion of your Steam library will let you take advantage in the first place.
I have considered that there are other ways to keep performance up, while still partaking in path tracing’s fruits. You could, say, lower DLSS from Quality to Performance mode, or drop other settings like textures or vegetation quality or whatever. But that’s not really in keeping with what path tracing is about, which is making your games look as good as they do in the pre-release bullshots. If you have to kill off other elements of that visual richness, it’s just defeating the point.