The gaming industry has been a forefront for technology since its early days, pushing the expectations of things like handheld computing, online communication, and of course, graphics. For the last seven years, ray tracing has been one of the bleeding-edge frontiers of graphics. But even as ray tracing-capable GPUs proliferate in consoles, PCs, and even handhelds, many gamers are still skeptical of the technology. So what's going on?It's a complex question, and answering it requires considering a number of factors. Those include game development standards that make poor or almost invisible use of ray tracing; the fact that ray tracing is a still-nascent technology; shifts in gaming habits and preferences; and the timing of the introduction of ray-tracing graphics cards with regard to shifts in the economy.Ray tracing is one of the oldest technologies in pre-rendered computer graphics, but is still in its infancy in real-time computer graphics. Real-time ray tracing uses simulated light bounces to light and render a game scene. This allows for an accurate rendering of lighting and shadows and detailed reflections that don't require a bunch of work by artists beforehand. Let's take a look at how ray tracing has played out in the gaming industry so far.Are ray-tracing GPUs common?First, let's talk about where we can find ray tracing GPUs out in the real world. If gamers don't have access to ray-tracing capable hardware, publishers and developers wouldn't be interested in incorporating these features into the games they release.Anyone who owns a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X|S console has some form of ray tracing available to them, and recent numbers show there are around at least 95 million of those systems in homes around the world (the PlayStation 5 has sold nearly 80 million consoles, and estimates show the PS5 outselling Xbox consoles anywhere from 2:1 to 5:1). The Switch 2 is also capable of some ray tracing, though in a much more limited capacity than even the Xbox Series S, adding a new, growing install base to the total.We also have the many gaming PCs and laptops out there, as well as gaming handhelds. The subset of those that run Steam help to provide some added numbers, thanks to the Steam Hardware Survey, which suggests that about 30% of responding users have graphics cards capable of ray-tracing.What that all means is that there are a lot of game consoles and PCs out there that are capable of ray tracing. It's still a demanding technology, and still a fast-evolving one, but no longer qualifies as a niche technology available to a sliver of high-end users.Are games designed with ray tracing in mind?There are many great showcases for real-time ray tracing in games that show how a game can take substantial advantage of the hardware, either designed from the ground up or, in the right cases, added in later. One of the earliest was Minecraft's optional RTX implementation (non-Nvidia cards support ray tracing in Minecraft, but the original implementation was a joint marketing effort between Mojang and Nvidia), which is now carried on mostly by mods like BetterRTX. Minecraft worked well thanks to its simple geometry and dynamic nature. Ray traced lighting completely changes the way Minecraft looks; if you're underground without a light, your surroundings are pitch black, while forests feel like dynamic, lively places.When I interviewed Assassin's Creed Shadows technical director Nicolas Lopez, he demonstrated how ray tracing is accelerating development and adding meaningful features that gamers can see. For example, Shadows' dynamic lighting helped the team enable four distinct seasons and a variety of weather conditions in the game without having to completely rethink and re-light the world. This gave gamers a significantly more varied game and allowed the developers to direct their effort toward making a more interesting game world.Other games make simpler--meaning they're easy to spot, but don't change the way you play the game--but still effective use of the tech. Some examples include the Spider-Man games and Remedy's Control, which both feature many big, flat panes of glass. All you have to do is walk past, smash through, or climb over a sheet of glass to see an accurate reflection appear and disappear; this was impossible without clever tricks before real-time ray tracing became available. Another Remedy game, Alan Wake 2, uses ray tracing to dynamically bounce light in dark, foliage-dense, flashlight-lit scenes; both the flashlight beam and the foliage the beam reflects off of are in motion, making ray tracing a solution that improves the realism of the scene and reduces developer workload.Some games, like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and Doom: The Dark Ages, are built to incorporate a certain amount of ray tracing, and ray-tracing hardware is required to play them on PC.Many more games, however, make a poor case for the technology. In my primer on ray and path-tracing technology, I go into more depth about this, so make sure to check that out if you're curious. But the short version is that a huge number of games, especially AAA games, don't have a lot of moving parts. Linear games, like first-person shooter campaigns, are more or less theme-park rides waiting for you to trigger animations and enemy reactions, set in a static world. Open-world games have a higher frequency of dynamic moving objects, but their environments are still mostly static, and even their day-night cycles are free from complications like seasonal changes and weather fluctuations.There's a world where ray tracing could add real fun to a multiplayer shooter: using reflectivity and shadow to help you spot or hide from enemies, for example. But as it is, these shooters are a poor fit for ray tracing, as it impacts performance but offers little visible benefit if you aren't pixel peeping. Shadows will be somewhat sharper, somewhat more accurate, and reflective things will show more accurate reflections, but many players will be more interested in the game running smoothly than enjoying those cosmetic differences.That means that in many of those games, spotting the effects of ray tracing requires active investigation on the part of the player. It's all but invisible when you're not taking a magnifying glass to every surface. On the other hand, regardless of whether the world is well-suited to ray tracing, its simple presence can be a huge performance hit to a game, just to make something like fences look slightly more "fence-y." If those are the types of games you play, it's no surprise that ray tracing might feel like a poor trade-off. Competitive multiplayer games like Call of Duty, Dota 2, and Fortnite are the most popular PC games around right now, and many players tend to prefer turning the graphics down in favor of a higher framerate. And let's not forget the demographic of gamers who prefer smaller indie releases to bigger, more technically complex ones--for many of those gamers, GPU power, let alone ray-tracing capability, is a factor.To wit, Battlefield 6 won't have ray tracing anytime soon, according to Christian Buhl, technical director on the game. Battlefield games have a reputation for poor launches at this point, so anything the team can do to make sure the game is as performant as possible at launch makes sense, and ray tracing in a game like Battlefield is simply an extra right now.Ray tracing isn't mature just yet (and gamers can tell)As mentioned before, real-time ray tracing is still a relatively nascent technology, having been out of reach until shortcuts and specialized hardware were available to lighten the substantial computational load required. The ray tracing we have in GPUs these days is still pretty computationally expensive, and requires so much visual clean-up (real-time ray tracing is very noisy) that upscaling and upsampling, done by services like Nvidia's own DLSS (Deep Learning Super-Sampling) and AMD's FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution), are needed to make it look good.So there's a lot of room to grow in both increasing the capacity for ray-tracing hardware and optimizing the algorithms that do it. For each game that releases with ray tracing features, we see performance comparisons pop up on places like Reddit and YouTube, and these always make note of the performance hit of enabling ray tracing. For many gamers, that makes it a wait-and-see technology, a curiosity and little else, until it matures.Further, the simple fact that it all but requires upscaling and upsampling can make it unappealing to some gamers. It's not hard to find people in the comments section of videos about ray tracing and DLSS arguing that upscaling an image is a cheat, and that an image should be a one-to-one pixel rendering of the original image. This is especially apparent on consoles. Instead of flipping a bunch of little switches to tweak performance, gamers are offered a simple choice: Quality or Performance--a higher-quality, often lower-resolution image, or a clean image with a higher, steadier frame rate. This feature preceded ray tracing but is generally how developers address support on consoles.The continued strength of the Nintendo Switch and the growing market of handheld gaming PCs both affect perception, too; handheld fans want games that can run on their handhelds, and thus won't want features that could make the game unplayable. While the Nintendo Switch 2 and some handheld gaming PCs are capable of some ray tracing, it remains to be seen how frequently these features will be used on devices where users are conscious of battery life. With that said, though, some teams are starting to explore the possibilities; Digital Foundry called Star Wars Outlaws a "ray-traced revelation" in a recent video. It could be a strong feature for the system moving forward.Bad timingWe also can't underestimate the effects of economics on the availability and perception of ray tracing. GPU prices have been anything but stable throughout the last seven years. The first spike arrived alongside (though not because of) ray-tracing cards; Nvidia's RTX 2000-series cards were released in the third quarter of 2018, as the crypto boom was just beginning to wane, which spiked GPU prices. Things stabilized between 2019 and 2020, but another period of instability would kick off with the COVID-19 pandemic.A new round of GPUs, increased institutional adoption of cryptocurrency, supply-chain constraints, and increased demand resulting from a pandemic-fueled round of PC upgrading, all contributed to the price spiking a second time in 2020. Now, as we head further into an era marked by President Donald Trump's unpredictable tariff implementation, another price spike is all but inevitable. We'll see GPU prices affected by availability and production cost.Additionally, inflation has generally pushed the cost of everything upward during this period, with high-end cards among those prices increases. That means that staying on the cutting edge of gaming hardware is getting more and more difficult, which puts some of the most appealing features of games out of reach for many gamers.New GPU feature unlockedRay tracing (and its constant companion, upscaling solutions like DLSS) is not the first new graphics feature Nvidia specifically has pushed into the marketplace. Back in 2001, Nvidia launched the GeForce 3 GPU--the first card to use shaders. It's too wide a topic to get into here, but shaders are an integral part of real-time graphics rendering and assist the rendering of the overwhelming majority of games in a variety of ways. Nvidia wants to repeat that with ray tracing and upscaling, making them so common that game developers will want to utilize them in as many games as possible.Ray tracing isn't going away, but it still has a few hurdles to overcome at all levels. First and foremost, game development has to change. Games like Assassin's Creed Shadows are finding novel and useful ways to implement it, and developers are learning to incorporate it into the game design process, but even after seven years, it's still relatively early days.Cards capable of handling significant ray tracing also need to proliferate. A lot of PC players have ray tracing-capable hardware, but that is by no means everybody. Nvidia RTX cards may make up about 30% of Steam's survey respondents, but the most common card among those users is the RTX 3060, which is now five years old. That's hindered by the rising costs of PC hardware, especially GPUs, and the resulting slowdown in upgrades that comes with that.We're nearing the point where penetration of ray tracing-capable GPUs is starting to hit critical mass, but we're not quite there yet. As game development advances and as people are able to update their hardware, ray tracing will become more feasible as a must-have feature and as one that makes a significant difference to gamers. Until then, gamers will continue to be reticent about ray tracing in video games.