All Games With Ray Tracing: Available and Upcoming Titles for PC

As of June 2022, the number of games with ray tracing support now stands at 84. The recent announcements also give hope for exciting development towards the end of the year and especially in 2023. Then, according to current plans, the first games based on Unreal Engine 5 will appear, which uses ray tracing by default. We have included the already confirmed ray tracing releases in the list of upcoming games, but we assume that this overview is by no means complete – we only list games whose RT support has already been confirmed officially or by credible sources.

Ray tracing, the virtual recreation of light rays, is here to stay. Ray tracing has long been the gold standard for high-end rendering, for example in animations and films, and the technology is also used in professional design to model as closely as possible to reality. In gaming, ray tracing has failed for years, since it was too taxing on system performance, and would significantly decrease frame rate.

That’s over now. With the introduction of DirectX 12 API, and its DirectX Raytracing (DXR) sub-system, a new graphics standard was set in motion three and a half years ago. NVIDIA was the first manufacturer of graphics hardware to bring ray tracing into the mainstream, and the GeForce RTX 20 graphics cards (Turing) featuring ray tracing processors have been available since autumn 2018. The successor generation GeForce RTX 30 (Ampere) is further developing the initially set basis and AMD has also jumped on ray tracing bandwagon in the end of 2020 with the Radeon 6000 series graphics cards.

The software landscape has made great accomplishments since the DXR was first introduced. Countless developers have already dealt with ray tracing or have already published games featuring ray tracing support. This resulted with complex calculations becoming more and more efficient, which benefits the production of future games. This topic also received additional attention from a hardware-based perspective, because the Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 consoles released at the end of 2020 are based on the same GPU architecture as the Radeon RX 6000 series. This means that developers are now developing and refining ray tracing techniques both on PC and consoles, which should ensure much better cross-platform synergy.

List of Games with Ray Tracing

Our curated list of ray tracing games shows which PC games can be beautified with ray tracing in the summer of 2022. Most of them are based on Epic’s Unreal Engine 4, because this graphics engine has long allowed developers to integrate the new effects with relatively little effort. The dominance of corresponding games is therefore hardly surprising. Ray-tracing reflections can be seen in most games, as this effect is one of the most striking from the graphics effects repertoire. Some also shoot beams to create accurate shadows. The potentially most complex effect is Raytracing Global Illumination, which is only used in a few select games.

Of course, more games with ray tracing support will appear in 2022 and beyond. Some of these have already been announced, as the list below shows. We are constantly expecting more new additions or more specific information on release dates and ray tracing effects of upcoming games. Updates to the list will follow as official announcements of new games with ray tracing support are released.

DXR, short for DirectX Raytracing, is a Windows 10 exclusive graphics interface and a component of DirectX 12 API, which AMD defined and approved together with NVIDIA, Intel, Microsoft and other committee members. The DXR enabled development of other computer technologies, such as Raytracing, Vulkan, RTX and DLSS.

Raytracing, DXR, RTX, and DLSS

RTX is not only an abbreviation in the name of the current GeForce GPU series, but is also a brand of NVIDIA. The GeForce RTX 20 graphics cards have been able to hardware accelerate real-time ray tracing since autumn 2018. Due to NVIDIA’s pioneering position, many games featuring ray tracing support were advertised with “RTX ready”, which caused the RTX acronym to become synonymous with ray tracing. This type of marketing caused a lot of confusion, but what is actually meant is DXR support, or support for the Microsoft standard. If the latter is used – and this is the case with all raytracing-compatible DirectX 12 games – any DXR-capable graphics card is compatible. Thus, Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs can also be used for this type of rendering. The Arc series of Intel gaming graphics cards, which will be launched in 2022, will also be compatible.

In addition to the DXR component of DirectX 12, there is another programming interface (API) to implement ray tracing effects – Vulkan. The non-Windows interface is also being pushed by a consortium Khronos, but is not evolving at the same pace as DirectX. The Vulkan ray tracing was not fully defined when the GeForce RTX 20 cards were released. Nevertheless, NVIDIA and some game developers experimented with the API in order to provide added value for GeForce buyers. As with the Vulkan predecessor OpenGL, manufacturers can bring in their own function extensions and thus address their hardware. This means that GPU manufacturers are free to make their drivers compatible with Vulkan.

And then there’s also DLSS. Behind this is a high-end AI supersampling method created by NVIDIA. Although DLSS is neither tied to ray tracing nor a lower-level API, it is mostly used in the context of ray tracing. The reason is simple: DLSS is NVIDIA’s solution to reducing the enormous computing load involved in ray tracing calculations. AMD has recently introduced its own counterpart to the DLSS, known as the FSR, while Intel will release its own XeSS upscaling technology once it officially releases its Arc GPUs.

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