Should you bother with... path tracing?

Path tracing has been back on the PC hardware agenda recently, with Nvidia’s sales pitch for the GeForce RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 more than lightly based on how good they are at shotgunning this premium graphics tech down your eye stalks. Yet beyond the sparkling glamour of marketing slides, however, path tracing remains exceptionally niche: nearly six years since Quake II RTX served as the tech’s de facto gaming debut, you can still count the number of compatible games on your fingers. Compare and contrast with the dozens upon dozens of games that have embraced ray tracing, path tracing’s less demanding nephew, and you’ll likely start wondering why more game devs don’t go for it.

We’re not here to answer that, though. This is Should You Bother With, here to investigate whether you should start using path traced effects to give your games – some of them, anyway – the full maxed-out-visuals treatment. Even if it takes a graphics card upgrade to do so.

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