22 Most Beautiful Games with Ray Tracing

22 most beautiful games with ray tracing share one thing: an RT graphics card finally shows what it can really do, because lighting, reflections, and shadows are calculated with physical accuracy instead of being faked through rasterization. We've rounded up 22 of the best — from titles where RT can't be switched off at all, to flagships with full path tracing, to classics that ray tracing transformed beyond recognition. When the technology first showed up in 2018, plenty of people wrote it off as a marketing gimmick — dozens of games on this list prove they were wrong.

There's no "RT on/off" toggle here — ray tracing is built into the graphics so deeply that the game simply won't launch without an RT card. Usually this means Ray-Traced Global Illumination: the entire scene's lighting is calculated with rays, setting the mood without artists hand-placing light sources. The entry bar is a card from the RTX 20 series or RX 6000 and up, and that's a fair price for the cleanest demonstration of the tech around — this is what RT looks like when it's built as the foundation, not bolted on afterward.

RTGI runs even on the lowest settings here — there's no turning it off, full stop. Doom: The Dark Ages drops the Doom Slayer into a grim fantasy Middle Ages, and ray-traced global illumination isn't an option, it's the foundation: every scene is built on it from the ground up, which also takes a huge load off the artists since light sources don't need manual placement. Without an RTX 20-series card, the game won't even start. Yet optimization is paradoxically solid — even a battle-worn RTX 2060 keeps up.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle from the makers of the recent Wolfenstein titles is even less forgiving than Doom: on 8 GB cards, the game crashes to desktop the moment you push settings past medium. The payoff justifies it, though — RT here covers lighting, shadows, and reflections smartly, and there's optional path tracing on top for anyone willing to trade frame rate for visuals. We dig into whether that trade is worth it in our Indiana Jones and the Great Circle review.

Half-Life 2 RTX is a fan-made remaster built entirely on path tracing, and without an RT card it simply won't open. Materials and lighting have been recalculated from scratch, so a twenty-year-old classic suddenly looks like it shipped yesterday. The one catch: not every level has been redone yet, just a handful — but if you own the original, trying it costs nothing.

The sterile labs of Aperture Science turn out to be a perfect match for ray tracing — the reflections off tile and metal in Portal with RTX look more striking than in any other game on this list. The remaster runs on NVIDIA RTX Remix, leans entirely on path tracing, and stays free for owners of the original. It's still demanding even with DLSS turned on — but the short test-chamber levels make that an easy trade.

Quake 2 RTX clearly shows how ray tracing can bring even a 1997 classic back to life: the remaster rebuilds the lighting entirely around path tracing, giving its grim tech corridors a sense of depth they never had before. It is also free, making it one of the best ways to quickly see what an RT graphics card can do in its purest form, without other visual effects getting in the way.

Path tracing is the heaviest form of RT that exists: instead of calculating individual effects with rays, the game calculates the entire lighting setup at once — direct and indirect light, reflections, shadows, transparency, all of it. The result gets you as close to photorealism as rendering currently goes, and the load is just as extreme — even a flagship card at 4K is lost without DLSS and frame generation. It's no coincidence that the three games below also show up regularly in our top of the most demanding PC games — it's basically the same list of reasons.

Night City at night, lit by hundreds of glowing signs, is one of the best showcases for ray tracing in the industry, and CD Projekt keeps proving it with every major update. Cyberpunk 2077 received an Overdrive mode with full path tracing applied across the entire lighting pipeline: direct and indirect lighting, reflections, shadows — everything. The performance cost is steep: without a powerful graphics card and DLSS with frame generation, decent frame rates are out of reach. That is exactly why Cyberpunk remains the standard test for whether a system can truly handle RT.

Alan Wake 2 wants to look like a film, and path tracing here isn't decoration — it's the tool that makes Sam Lake's vision possible at all. Path tracing covers absolutely every light source: direct and indirect light, reflections, shadows, transparency — and that's exactly what makes the dark forest and the writer's neon nightmares feel so cinematic. Metacritic — 89.

At launch, Black Myth: Wukong unofficially turned into a benchmark — Unreal Engine 5 with hardware ray tracing plus optional path tracing, calculating the lighting of ancient temples and dense forests, turned out to be a real stress test for any graphics card. Dense particle effects in the soulslike boss fights pile on even more load. MC 82.

Ray tracing's most underrated trick is breathing new life into games that are decades old. Through RTX Remix and official patches, developers swap traditional lighting for ray-traced lighting, add physically accurate reflections and dynamic shadows, and a classic you know pixel for pixel suddenly looks like it shipped this week. Some of these are free for owners of the original — the only thing you'll need to spend money on is the graphics card.

Moving a 2006 RPG onto Unreal Engine 5 is a massive undertaking on its own, but it's Lumen with RTGI plus ray-traced shadows and reflections that make The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered feel like a genuinely current game rather than one with upscaled textures. The province of Cyrodiil finally gets lit the way it should be.

The PC version of GTA 5 unexpectedly overtook the console next-gen release: as part of the free Expanded & Enhanced upgrade, the game picked up exclusive RT features — RTGI, RTAO, ray-traced reflections and shadows — that noticeably sharpen the atmosphere on the streets of Los Santos. Good news if you don't own a flagship system: at 1440p with RT and DLSS, an RTX 4060 handles it just fine. Metacritic — 96.

The Witcher 3 already looks the part without ray tracing — but with it, Geralt's world gains a sense of depth it simply doesn't have otherwise: precise soft shadows and ambient occlusion (RTAO) make every object in frame feel solid rather than painted on.

It sounds like an odd pairing — blocky graphics and ray tracing — but the RTX version of Minecraft changes the game beyond recognition. Lighting becomes fully dynamic, physically accurate reflections show up in water, glass, ice, and metal, and the tech even nudges the gameplay a little: placing torches suddenly requires actual thought instead of scattering them at random.

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition is the game that won over a good chunk of ray-tracing skeptics back in its day. The developers swapped traditional lighting for RTGI entirely, no half-measures, and post-apocalyptic Russia suddenly started handling light with genuine realism. The difference was striking enough that this game became something like the demo argument for the whole technology.

Ray tracing doesn't have to be a technical showpiece — sometimes it's simply part of the art direction. It shows up strongest wherever there are a lot of reflective surfaces: neon megacities, glass skyscrapers, wet asphalt after rain, metal and gloss. In sci-fi and cyberpunk, those reflections paired with soft lighting practically build the atmosphere on their own, while in horror and adventure games RT works differently — it adds depth to shadows, so dark locations stop feeling like flat backdrops.

New York in Marvel's Spider-Man 2 is built almost entirely out of reflective surfaces — glass skyscrapers, metal, wet asphalt after rain — which is exactly why ray-traced reflections function almost like a gameplay element here, not just a visual bonus: without them, the city feels noticeably flatter and more painted-on while you're swinging through it.

"Pixar graphics, only in real time" is the comparison Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart gets constantly, and ray tracing is a big part of why. The PC version even adds extra RT effects beyond the console build, so the Lombax's jumps between dimensions actually look better than the original PS5 release. MC 86 on PC.

Snow melts, ice cracks underfoot, seasons cycle through one after another — the reactive environment in Assassin's Creed Shadows runs on RTGI across the entire open world of feudal Japan, which is why the shift in light from dawn to dusk feels honest instead of scripted. Interiors got the same treatment: reflections give them a sense of depth the series never had before. MC ~78 on PC (console scores run a bit higher, around 82–86).

Bioluminescent flora glowing in the dark is exactly the kind of thing ray tracing was made for, and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora leans into it fully: hybrid RT here covers global illumination, reflections, and shadows, bringing the in-game Pandora closer to how it looked on screen in Cameron's films. The scores are middling (Metacritic ~76), but visually this is one of the best-looking games of its generation.

The bureaucratic horror of the Oldest House in Control is built almost entirely out of glossy office surfaces, and ray tracing here isn't a one-off effect — it's part of the house style, with reflections showing up in practically every scene. The developers didn't stop at launch, either: years after release, the game picked up a major patch adding an Ultra ray-tracing preset that fans had been asking for. Metacritic ~83.

Ghostwire: Tokyo makes a simple point: sometimes all you need is a few puddles for ray tracing to do all the work. Reflections of neon signs in the wet asphalt of an empty nighttime Tokyo are easily one of the most beautiful moments in this whole list. MC ~75.

Five RT effects at once — RTGI, ray-traced sun shadows, RT reflections, ambient occlusion, and a ray-traced flashlight — make Dying Light 2 Stay Human one of the most RT-heavy games on this list. The flashlight is especially important: it simulates realistic light bouncing off walls and surfaces, and the infected city constantly pushes you into dark alleys and unlit interiors. Without it, nighttime runs would feel noticeably less unnerving.

On the Knowhere level — a sprawling urban mass of metal and gloss floating in space — the difference between ray tracing and old-school SSR in Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy is obvious immediately: reflections get sharper and more dynamic, without the screen-edge artifacts rasterization tends to leave behind.

A pattern this top keeps confirming over and over: sci-fi and cyberpunk settings are where RT pays off the most, and the isometric The Ascent is no exception — precise reflections and layered, complex lighting bring its dense future-city setting fully to life.

In short, it's a rendering method that genuinely simulates how light behaves instead of faking it with approximations. The software traces the path of every individual ray — how it reflects, refracts, fades. The result is lighting and shadows that look the way they would in the real world, not like a painted scene. The technology shows what it can really do on NVIDIA RTX cards and AMD Radeon RX 6000 and newer — on older cards it's either unavailable or running in software at a crawl.

The baseline is an RTX 20-series card or AMD Radeon RX 6000. For comfortable play with individual RT effects at 1440p, a mid-range card like the RTX 4060 with DLSS turned on is enough. Full path tracing at 4K is a different story — without a flagship card, upscaling, and frame generation, it's not happening. The heavier the mode, the more critical DLSS or FSR becomes.

It comes down to scope. Regular RT calculates individual effects with rays — reflections, say, or shadows — while everything else still gets drawn by rasterization. Path tracing goes further and calculates the entire lighting setup with rays at once: direct and indirect light, reflections, shadows, transparency. The result is closer to photorealism, but the hardware demands jump dramatically — which is exactly why full path tracing only shows up in a handful of games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Alan Wake 2.

Yes, significantly. Depending on the game and the mode, frame rate can drop by 30–60%, and full path tracing cuts even deeper. That's exactly why RT almost never ships without DLSS or FSR alongside it: upscaling on "quality" mode recovers 30–50% of performance with barely any loss of sharpness, and frame generation adds even more on top.

The easiest route is through RTX remasters of classics, some of which cost nothing at all. Portal with RTX and Quake 2 RTX are both built entirely on path tracing and are free, Half-Life 2 RTX updates the Valve shooter for owners of the original, and Minecraft picked up an official RTX mode. These tech showcases exist for exactly this purpose — seeing what your card can do without buying a new game.

There's no universal answer — it depends what you're willing to trade. If your card can handle it and the implementation is solid, RT noticeably boosts atmosphere, especially anywhere there's a lot of reflective surfaces: neon cities, glass, wet asphalt. But if frame rate drops to an uncomfortable level, you're better off sticking to individual effects or turning on DLSS — playability still matters more than a checkbox that says "ray tracing enabled."

Do you leave ray tracing on, or sacrifice it for higher FPS? Tell us in the comments what card you're playing on and which game impressed you the most with RT.

22 games should keep you busy, but if your RT card is still asking for more, here are three more projects where ray tracing noticeably changes the picture. The tech has long since stopped being a flagship-only feature — it shows up in live-service shooters, adventure games, and remakes alike, so there's plenty to try across genres.

Watch Dogs: Legion was one of the first games to show what RT reflections look like at the scale of an entire city: wet streets and glass storefronts across dystopian London reflect the neon overlay, and the cyberpunk atmosphere gets noticeably denser as a result.

In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, ray tracing handles shadows specifically — soft, physically accurate shadow play makes the dense South American jungle and dark tombs feel noticeably more three-dimensional than standard rasterization manages.

Resident Evil Requiem goes further than Capcom's previous RT-enabled games: instead of separate reflections and shadows, it uses full path tracing to render light, shadows, and reflections in dark interiors more accurately. For horror, this is almost the perfect technology — darkness no longer feels like a filter laid over the image, but like a physical part of the space itself.