Has Ray Tracing Stalled? A 2025 State of the Tech Review

Ray tracing was supposed to be the next great visual revolution. When NVIDIA launched RTX in 2018 it was marketed as the future we had all been waiting for. Realistic shadows, physically accurate reflections and global illumination that behaved like real light. It was bold and genuinely impressive, at least in tech demos.

But in 2025 the conversation has shifted. Most gamers still play without ray tracing, many AAA studios have stopped prioritising it, and even the newest GPUs only deliver playable frame rates with the help of heavy upscaling.

So the question is simple. Has ray tracing stalled?

This article breaks down the state of ray tracing today, why progress is slower than expected and what the future may look like.

The Problem: Ray Tracing Is Still Too Expensive

Ray tracing has not reached mass adoption because the cost per frame is still extremely high. Even the best GPUs like the RTX 5090 or RX 9070 XTX can lose more than half their performance with full RT features enabled.

There are several reasons for this.

1. Path tracing is the real goal and it is brutally demanding

The industry wants full path traced lighting rather than hybrid raster plus RT effects. That requires:

• Billions of rays cast per frame
• Large neighbourhood sampling
• Intelligent noise reduction
• Very high memory bandwidth

Current GPUs simply do not have enough compute, cache or raw throughput to handle this at native resolutions.

2. Upscaling has become a crutch

DLSS 4 and FSR 4 now offload much of the workload by generating pixels rather than rendering them. This keeps frame rates high but it also hides the fact that true ray tracing performance has not moved dramatically.

3. Developers are prioritising performance and stability

Studios have learned that players prefer smooth gameplay over perfect lighting physics. This has changed the type of rendering pipelines developers are building. Many blockbuster games still launch without ray tracing at all, focusing instead on high frame rates and stable frame pacing.

Ray Tracing Adoption in Games Has Slowed Down

The pattern is very clear in modern releases.

• More games ship with basic ray traced shadows or ambient occlusion only
• Fewer studios are implementing full RTGI
• Only a handful of titles experiment with path tracing
• Many games provide RT only as a marketing bullet point

Why is this happening? Because ray tracing adds months of development time, requires artists to rebuild lighting workflows and increases QA complexity. When players spend most of their time using performance mode or competitive settings, studios have to focus effort where it matters.

GPU Hardware Has Improved but Not Fast Enough

NVIDIA and AMD have made real architectural improvements.

NVIDIA

• Third generation RT cores
• Stronger denoisers
• Much faster BVH traversal
• DLSS 4 frame generation and upscaling

AMD

• Ray accelerators that finally compete
• Hardware FSR 4 support on RDNA 3.5 and RDNA 4
• Improved intersection performance
• Much larger caches

These are important steps, but the real performance uplift for ray tracing has not kept pace with expectations. Rasterisation continues to improve faster than RT compute density.

Why Ray Tracing Is Not Going Away

It may feel like RT has stalled, but this is not the end. Instead, ray tracing is entering a slower, more practical phase of adoption. Several trends show promise.

1. Better reconstruction and denoising

AI driven reconstruction will reduce the number of rays needed per pixel. This will do more for ray tracing efficiency than raw GPU horsepower.

2. Higher cache and chiplet designs

Upcoming GPUs are likely to use huge L2 and L3 caches with extremely high internal bandwidth. This directly benefits ray traversal workloads.

3. Engine level improvements

Unreal Engine 5 and Frostbite continue to evolve. Hardware aware RT pipelines make it easier for studios to optimise features without rewriting entire renderers.

4. Console influence

Next generation consoles will almost certainly have stronger RT hardware. When consoles support a feature well, PC adoption increases automatically.

The Real Question: Should Gamers Care in 2025?

It depends on what you want.

You should care about ray tracing if:

• You enjoy cinematic visuals
• You play slower paced games
• You want the best possible lighting
• You have a high end GPU

You probably should not worry too much if:

• You play competitive shooters
• You prioritise high frame rates
• You have a midrange GPU
• You prefer performance mode over fidelity mode

The truth is simple. Ray tracing is a luxury feature in 2025, not an essential one.

Why Traditional Gaming PCs Still Matter

This is a key point for buyers.

Ray tracing is not cloud ready. Latency makes streamed RT almost impossible without heavy artifacts. Local hardware still provides the best experience and is the only way to run high quality RT at usable frame rates.

Even in the future when path tracing becomes standard, dedicated GPUs in local systems will always deliver the most consistent and lowest latency performance. That means gaming PCs remain the best platform for visual fidelity.

Final Thoughts

Ray tracing has not failed. It has simply matured and slowed down. The hype phase is over and we are now in the long, steady progress phase where improvements arrive gradually instead of dramatically.

As GPUs grow, caches expand and denoisers improve, ray tracing will eventually become the standard. But for now most gamers still get the best results from strong rasterisation performance with optional RT features on the side.

Ray tracing is the future but not the present. And that means choosing a balanced gaming PC with strong raster performance is still the smartest move in 2025.

Tarl @ Gamertech