Thanks to the PS5 and Xbox Series X, ray tracing is seemingly everywhere right now, and that’s super freaking cool.
When the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti made their debut way back at Gamescom 2018, the way Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was selling the technology was totally working on me. I’ve always been the type of person that values eye candy in PC games over frame rates, always choosing to play at 30 fps, rather than daring to lower settings below the highest settings. Ray tracing was, and is, the ultimate eye-candy. Beyond being a technological marvel that it even works in real time in video games right now, there have been games like Control and Metro Exodus where the tech has truly heightened the presentation of the game. But the games that have supported this tech have been few and far between since Nvidia Turing’s launch, thanks in large part to the fact that you needed an expensive RTX GPU to even use it. Thankfully, those days are now ending. Like a lot of people right now, I have been trying and failing to buy a PS5 since the console launched in early November. I have been there refreshing my cart on the Walmart website trying to get through to checkout to no prevail. However, I’m already starting to see the benefit of the PS5 and Xbox Series X existing, even though there isn’t one in my apartment right now. Alongside the launch of these next-generation consoles, a ton of games have been launching that support ray tracing.
