Raytracing Games 2021: These games are trendy

Ray tracing makes the light look more realistic in games. Sounds easy at first, most gamers think of more beautiful sunrises and atmospheric nights. But ray tracing is more: The technology ensures, for example, that objects in the game world are reflected in a puddle or that shadows move along with the course of the sun. All of this creates an unprecedented and realistic atmosphere. And all of this requires a lot of computing power, such as that offered by the Xbox Series X or the PlayStation 5, or the new generation of graphics cards from Nvidia and AMD.

Ray tracing games: Still little choice

Ray tracing is of course not something for every gamer. If you can do without realistic games, you don’t need shadows that move with the position of the sun. And e-sports titles such as “Dota 2” or “Counter Strike – Global Offensive” are far from ray tracing. Here, good performance and many images per second are more important than a realistic and pretty game world.

There are not many ray tracing games yet. But nevertheless, more and more game developers are gaining joy in expressing their creativity with the new and better light calculation. So far, ray tracing has been withheld from new and very complex games. But also oldies like “World of Warcraft” offer the pretty light calculation. However, only in the latest add-on to the online role-playing game.

These ray tracing games are already on the market

Raytracing Games 2021: This is what PC gamers can expect

In the course of the year, gamers can of course look forward to more ray tracing games:

Raytracing graphics cards: The chips from Nvidia and AMD

Console gamers who want to experience the benefits of ray tracing need a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X. PC gamers have a little more choice. In theory, any chip that supports DirectX-12 can perform ray tracing calculations. However, this requires a lot of power, which is why older graphics cards are not suitable for this. AMD cards that can compute ray tracing are the RX 6800, RX 6800 XT, and the RX 6900 XT. All cards are based on AMD’s RDNA-2 technology.

The selection is much larger with competitor Nvidia. Three generations of graphics cards from the manufacturer can calculate ray tracing. How useful ray tracing is on a GTX 1660 remains questionable. Because the better light calculation eats up so much power on the old cards that most games become unplayable. From the latest generation of Nividia cards onwards, ray tracing should give most gamers pleasure.

The Nvidia graphics cards at a glance: