It’s remarkable to think that real-time ray tracing hasn’t been around for a decade yet, and yet you can already see clear distinctions between the technology’s initial support and the widespread, in-depth implementations it enjoys now in modern video games. What started as a way for Nvidia to sell new graphics cards has become an entirely fundamental shift in how various parts of video games are rendered, providing a level of level of visual upgrades that can truly make a difference when used intelligently.

But just what is ray tracing? It’s not something that can quickly be explained, but you can imagine it as a system that more accurately simulates the interactions of light within a scene. In the past, convincing lighting and reflections have either been done by meticulously crafted baked lighting or cube map reflections, sometimes leaning on features such as screen-space information (information objects can provide to, say, a reflective puddle of water, as long as that object stays within view). Like anything trying to simulate real life, there are limitations to what scenarios can be accounted for, leading to oddities in reflections and light bleed if you know how to look for them. Ray tracing solves this to a degree. Light can now bounce between objects in a scene, whether they’re within view or not, and use that to accurate interact with other objects around you. A red light, for example, can now communicate to a nearby metal that it needs to be reflected, and reflected with a certain hue too. That’s a rudimentary example of how this incredibly complex technology works and doesn’t even begin to go into the differences between ray tracing and path tracing, but you can read more about both here.

What’s far more important is ray tracing’s effect on games. You don’t need to explore open world games like Spider-Man 2 or Ghostwire: Tokyo for long before noticing the crisp reflections in rain-slicked roads you’re walking on or thousands of skyscraper windows you’re whizzing past. It doesn’t have to be a massive world either; the captivating office spaces of Control are made so much more believable with translucent office windows reflecting and refracting the environment around them, while the hallways of each test chamber in Portal finally exude a level of creepy cleanliness that the original only managed through imagination. Technological marvels such as Cyberpunk 2077 brings everything full circle, with an array of different ray tracing technologies and even patch tracing support that radically transform the detail that Night City and its neon-drench streets is able to offer. Contrast that with Minecraft and you can see that it the technology isn’t just for games targeting photorealism — ray tracing has a lot to offer wherever lighting is involved, and that’s pretty much everywhere.

Here are what we consider some of the best games with ray tracing, covering a wide range of implementation types and showcasing the best examples of how this technology can enhance your experience.

• Developer: CD Projekt Red
• Release Date: December 10, 2020
• Platforms: Xbox Series X|S, PS5, Nintendo Switch 2, PC, Xbox One, PS4, Mac

CD Projekt Red has long been known to push visual boundaries with its large open worlds, and Cyberpunk 2077 was no exception. Despite some performance troubles at launch, the streets of Night City have become one of the go-to environments to show off how dramatically different a game can look with ray-traced effects. Everything from global illumination, reflections, sun shadows, and more are accurately rendered using real-time rays shot out into the expansive world, bringing the neon-soaked streets to life. After launch, CD Projekt Red went a step further and added Overdrive mode – an experimentative mode that added Path Tracing to the RPG to produce some of the most accurate lighting effects you’ll find in a game to date, given you have the hardware to run it at anything close to acceptable framerates.

• Developer: Remedy Entertainment
• Release Date: October 27, 2023
• Platforms: Xbox Series X|S, PS5, PC

Dark, spooky forests and slick wet roads are perfect environments for ray-traced effects to shine, and Alan Wake II gives you plenty of room to experience both. With so much emphasis on light as a mechanic, whether it’s from your trusty flashlight or life-saving flares, having as much of that supported by ray tracing can make a noticeable impact on image quality, so much so that it can make the steep performance cost on consoles worth it. But it’s on PC where Alan Wake II really shines, on hardware that supports its incredibly demanding path tracing mode that blends traditional ray-traced direct lighting with much more accurate (and hardware-intensive) path-traced reflections and global illumination. Atmosphere is so important to survival horrors, and Alan Wake II makes a good case for having ray tracing on to support that.

• Developer: Game Science
• Release Date: August 20, 2024
• Platforms: Xbox Series X|S, PS5, PC

With a variety of environments that sweep between dense forests and sunshine-soaked snowy mountains, Black Myth: Wukong showcases the subtleties of path tracing if you have the hardware to support it. Its full ray tracing suite simulates lighting, reflections, ambient occlusions, and shadows all through path tracing techniques, with multiple ray bounces accurately calculating the complex blending of light sources and colors. Coupled with reflections that react correction to the flowing of surfaces like water, reflecting and refracting light throw transparent and opaque caustics equally, Black Myth: Wukong showcases how far these techniques have come since being introduced less than a decade ago.

• Developer: Insomniac Games
• Release Date: June 11, 2021
• Platforms: PS5, PC

One of the PlayStation 5’s first big exclusives, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart still stands as one of the console’s best-looking games, too. Its Pixar-like visual qualities are accentuated by some impressive ray tracing effects, specifically when it comes to attractive reflections. These pop in hallways filled with shiny metals, planets awash with large bodies of water, and neon-drenched streets slicked with rain. All of these bounce the game’s striking colors and weapon effects, enhancing the chaotic action while adding an attractive new visual layer to an already eye-pleasing package.

• Developer: MachineGames
• Release Date: December 9, 2024
• Platforms: Xbox Series X|S, PS5, PC

Up until recently, ray-traced features in games were mostly optional extras that you could disable in pursuit of better performance. That isn’t the case with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, one of a few games out today that have ray-traced lighting as a mandatory feature. From the subdued scenes in the Vatican to the blisteringly bright sands of Giza, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle shows that having incredibly accurate lighting and shadows doesn’t have to come at the expense of frame rates, with MachineGames’ work on the latest version of iDTech producing some spectacular results across both console and PC.

• Developer: Remedy Entertainment
• Release Date: August 27, 2019
• Platforms: Xbox Series X|S, PS5, PC, Xbox One, PS4

When you think about early ray-traced games, Control is arguably the one that made the case for keeping the resource-hogging option enabled. The corridors of The Old House and its distinct office vibes aren’t the sort of setting you’d imagine ray tracing to showcase well in, but it doesn’t take long to see what a drastic difference it makes to the game’s overall visual makeup. The glass windows from countless meeting rooms become accurately translucent, letting you peer into them as you whizz by. The pristine floors within the brutalist architecture does a good job of reflecting the chaos that ensues within its walls, bringing an extra layer of depth to Control’s frantic combat. Over time, Control and its ray-traced implementation has become easier and easier to run on more modern hardware, and it remains a must-play if you haven’t experienced it that way yet.

• Developer: iD Software
• Release Date: May 15, 2025
• Platforms: Xbox Series X|S, PS5, PC

Much like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Doom: The Dark Ages is another game that requires hardware capable of driving ray-traced features. That shouldn’t be that surprising given that both games run on the same engine, but it’s another example of how far the technology has come in terms of balancing image quality and performance. Doom: The Dark Ages demands high frame rates for its fast-paced gameplay, so having that within reach while enriching the world with rich lighting and eye-catching reflections that bring spaces both big and small to life feels like getting to have your cake and eat it too.

• Developer: 4A Games
• Release Date: February 14, 2019
• Platforms: Xbox Series X|S, PS5, PC, Xbox One

Another one of the earliest games to adopt ray-traced features, the third entry in the Metro series is striking. Its oppressive hubs are accentuated by some remarkable lighting, best seen in the improvements made in the game’s Enhanced Edition that launched a few years post the original launch. Coupled with better versions of upscaling technologies like DLSS that improve performance without much of a visual hit, ray tracing adds another dimension to the post-apocalyptic worlds that Exodus lets you explore, inviting you to spend as much time as possible picking apart each locale.

• Developer: Insomniac Games
• Release Date: October 20, 2023
• Platforms: PS5, PC

With New York covered in massive skyscrapers wrapped by walls of reflective windows, Spider-Man 2 offers the perfect playground for ray-traced reflections to show off in. Baking in reflections creates a convincing effect when you’re zipping around quickly as Peter or Miles, but ray tracing is what brings the city to life when you pause for a moment and take in the scenery while hanging off the Empire State building. Seeing simple pedestrian life go by in a building’s windows, or observing your aerial antics reflected back at you creates a convincing recreation of the city that never sleeps that is a joy to explore. Pick the right suit for Miles Morales and you’ll get to enjoy these eye-catching reflections around your entire body, which is a nice touch too.

• Developer: Mojang Studios
• Release Date: May 17, 2009
• Platforms: Xbox Series X|S, PS5, PC, Xbox One, PS4, Nintendo Switch, Mobile

When you think of the blocky, pixelated nature of Minecraft, ray tracing doesn’t seem like a toolset that would lend itself to any facet of its visual design. That’s still true, not because Minecraft doesn’t look great with its path tracing enabled, but because of how it transforms the game so significantly. It’s still recognizable as Minecraft, but the visual overhaul that accurate lighting and reflections creates, coupled with significant material and texture changes to support these features, transforms Minecraft into something entirely different from what you might expect. It’s a showpiece more than a preferred way to play, which makes sense given how involved Nvidia was in making it happen, but it’s nevertheless still a worthwhile sandbox to play around in just to see what your new graphics card can do.

• Developer: Valve
• Release Date: December 8, 2022
• Platforms: PC

Valve’s 2007 classic was reinvigorated with ray tracing nearly 15 years after its initial release. The hallways of the Aperture Lab that you find yourself completing puzzles in beautifully bounces the light around in ways the original was never equipped to support. But it’s the portals themselves that see the biggest improvement–with ray-traced reflections and light bouncing the world that is mirrored in your portals has never looked as crisp, which helps you appreciate the titular hook of this puzzle adventure even more. Configuring Portal RTX to run best on your machine is slightly more challenging than it should be with the less user friend developer menus you’ll need to tinker with to get the best results, but it worth investing just a little bit of time to reexperience one of the best games ever in a new way.

• Developer: Tango Gameworks
• Release Date: March 25, 2022
• Platforms: Xbox Series X|S, PS5, PC

It’s easy to see the strengths of ray tracing in settings with lots of rain and lots of bright, neon lighting. So, it’s no wonder then that Ghostwire: Tokyo is almost the perfect playground in which you can enjoy some of the most noticeable improvements that ray tracing has to offer. The combination of eye-catching effects from your various attacks and the light they cast around you is enough to justify getting lost in monster-filled streets of the metropolitan city, while the ever-present rain covers roads in richly-detailed pools of water that reflect the world back at you with remarkable detail. Developer Tango Gameworks would move onto a drastically different visual aesthetic with Hi-Fi Rush, but you’d be doing yourself a disservice by forgetting about its weird and gorgeous game just before it.

• Developer: CD Projekt Red
• Release Date: May 18, 2015
• Platforms: Xbox Series X|S, PS5, PC, Xbox One, PS4, Nintendo Switch

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt launched three years before Nvidia introduced the first ray tracing-capable graphics cards into the market, but it’s an open-world adventure that CD Projekt Red revisited after its work on the in-house ray tracing suite created for Cyberpunk 2077. The results aren’t as dramatic, but having shadows and global illumination handled by ray tracing does lend itself nicely to The Witcher 3’s dreamy sunsets and hazy sun rises, especially if you’re taking a journey through the serene lands of Toussaint in the game’s Blood and Wine expansion. CD Projekt Red has shifted to Unreal Engine for The Witcher 4, which should allow for a more robust implementation for the series going forward, but it’s still worth seeing how much better a 10-year-old game can look today.

• Developer: Rockstar Games
• Release Date: September 17, 2013
• Platforms: Xbox Series X|S, PS5, PC, Xbox One, PS4

When Grand Theft Auto V released in 2013, the idea of real-time ray tracing was still more than half a decade away. It would take around the same time for Rockstar to add the features into its open-world epic, letting players reexperience it with added visual flair. It’s not wholly transformative, but the addition of ray-traced global illumination allows sunlight to wrap around the world more convincingly, while ray-traced reflections on certain surfaces do wonders to bring a city adorned with glass-laden skyscrapers to life. It’s a small taste of some of the work Rockstar is undoubtedly doing for Grand Theft Auto VI in 2026, giving you something to pass the time until then.