ray tracing
noun
variants
or less commonly ray-tracing
or raytracing
computers
: a process of creating digital images that include a simulation of real-world illumination by calculating the paths that individual beams of light would travel to a viewer's eye in a depicted scene
So, what even is ray tracing? Well, it's an advanced and lifelike way of rendering light and shadows in a scene. … However, because ray tracing works by simulating and tracking every ray of light produced by a source of lighting, it kind of takes a lot of horsepower …—
Jackie Thomas
Jackie ThomasBoth companies eventually boasted that high-end graphical features such as ray-tracing would happen on smartphones.—C. Scott Brown
C. Scott BrownWhile traditional lighting (AKA rasterization) in games works by essentially using clever trickery to approximate believable lighting, raytracing behaves much more like real light, simulating the actual path light rays would take from their source to your eyes.—Napier Lopez
Napier Lopezray-tracing capabilities
a GPU with improved ray tracing performance
Examples of ray tracing in a Sentence
Recent Examples on the Web
Steel Nomad Light is a 1440p test without ray tracing, focusing on raw graphics rasterization.
—PCMAG, 12 Mar. 2025
The enhanced version of the game brings a host of new technical and graphical features and options, including support for faster SSDs to reduce loading times, new ray tracing features like ambient occlusion and global illumination, support for AMD FSR and Nvidia DLSS, and more.
—Russel Honoré, Newsweek, 6 Mar. 2025
The higher-speed chip also unlocks some additional graphics capabilities like ray tracing, mesh shading, and dynamic caching for graphics-intensive tasks.
—Brenda Stolyar, WIRED, 5 Mar. 2025
At a resolution of 2560 x 1440 in games, AMD’s own benchmarks point at an average 38% uplift over the RX 7900 GRE with the biggest gains being in ray tracing, although that card had a launch price of just $549.
—Antony Leather, Forbes, 28 Feb. 2025
Compared to a popular card of last generation, namely the RX 7900 GRE, the Radeon RX 9070 is 20% faster on average with over 30% improvement in some ray tracing games at 2560 x 1440.
—Antony Leather, Forbes, 28 Feb. 2025
Finishing-up again with a modern, gorgeous and graphically rich game title, Black Myth: Wukong definitely puts a strain on all GPU contenders at its Cinematic quality preset with full ray tracing employed.
—Dave Altavilla, Forbes, 23 Jan. 2025
In games like Total War: Three Kingdoms that don’t support ray tracing, the Intel Arc B570 didn’t perform quite as well against the competition.
—PCMAG, 25 Jan. 2025
This means that ray tracing is core to the game design, although PC players can still run the game without ray tracing capable hardware.
—Gordon G. Chang, Newsweek, 24 Jan. 2025
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PCMAG, 12 Mar. 2025
The enhanced version of the game brings a host of new technical and graphical features and options, including support for faster SSDs to reduce loading times, new ray tracing features like ambient occlusion and global illumination, support for AMD FSR and Nvidia DLSS, and more.
—Russel Honoré, Newsweek, 6 Mar. 2025
The higher-speed chip also unlocks some additional graphics capabilities like ray tracing, mesh shading, and dynamic caching for graphics-intensive tasks.
—Brenda Stolyar, WIRED, 5 Mar. 2025
At a resolution of 2560 x 1440 in games, AMD’s own benchmarks point at an average 38% uplift over the RX 7900 GRE with the biggest gains being in ray tracing, although that card had a launch price of just $549.
—Antony Leather, Forbes, 28 Feb. 2025
Compared to a popular card of last generation, namely the RX 7900 GRE, the Radeon RX 9070 is 20% faster on average with over 30% improvement in some ray tracing games at 2560 x 1440.
—Antony Leather, Forbes, 28 Feb. 2025
Finishing-up again with a modern, gorgeous and graphically rich game title, Black Myth: Wukong definitely puts a strain on all GPU contenders at its Cinematic quality preset with full ray tracing employed.
—Dave Altavilla, Forbes, 23 Jan. 2025
In games like Total War: Three Kingdoms that don’t support ray tracing, the Intel Arc B570 didn’t perform quite as well against the competition.
—PCMAG, 25 Jan. 2025
This means that ray tracing is core to the game design, although PC players can still run the game without ray tracing capable hardware.
—Gordon G. Chang, Newsweek, 24 Jan. 2025
Cite this Entry
“Ray tracing.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ray%20tracing. Accessed 22 Mar. 2025.
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