Optimizing your gaming PC for ray tracing allows you to enjoy shadows, textures, reflections in high detail. Turning on ray tracing means you put more stress on PC hardware. Configuring your PC for ray tracing performance creates a perfect balance between hardware, thus avoiding bottleneck issues.
Optimizing Your Gaming PC for Ray Tracing
Follow the steps below to improve ray tracing performance on your machine:
1. Update GPU Drivers for Ray Tracing Support
This is the first step you need to follow before doing anything else. Updating your GPU drivers fix bugs and improve performance.
Updating to the newer GPU drivers doesn’t guarantee ray tracing support. It’s the hardware (RT cores) that are responsible for producing ray tracing visuals in gaming. Make sure you have a graphics card (Nvidia or AMD) that supports native ray-tracing.
If you have any Nvidia RTX 3000, 4000, 5000 or AMD RX 6000 Series graphics card, you can enable ray-tracing rightaway.
Latest generation graphics cards from Nvidia or AMD come with updated drivers. However, if you have an older generation GPU, download and install the latest drivers.
2. Enable Ray Tracing in Game Settings
Turn on the ray-tracing option from the in-game settings. Not every game supports ray-tracing.
Every game has its own gaming engine. However, you’ll find the ray tracing option in the graphics or in-game settings menu. Most games have this disabled by default. You GPU won’t be able to render ray tracing if it’s turned off in the game settings.
3. Use DLSS or FSR to Balance Quality & Performance
DLSS (supported by NVIDIA) and FSR (supported by AMD) boost frame rate and improve ray tracing performance by rendering frames at a lower resolution.
Nvidia uses advanced AI (DLSS) to upscale visual performance. AMD uses spatial/temporal techniques (FSR) to boost gaming visuals.
Both technologies (DLSS or FSR) reduce workload on GPU while utilizing other resources for ray tracing effects like shadows, reflections, illumination, etc.
You can turn on the DLSS or FSR option from the in-game settings.
4. Optimize Graphics Settings for Ray Tracing Titles
To optimize graphics settings for ray tracing titles, focus on balancing image quality and frame rate.
- Start by adjusting DLSS (NVIDIA) or FSR (AMD) to “Quality” or “Balanced” mode.
- Adjust the ray tracing reflections, shadows, and lighting to “Medium” or “High.” Avoid the “Ultra” settings unless you have a high-end graphics card. It’s optional to non-ray-traced settings like motion blur, depth of field, film grain, and ambient occlusion.
- Switch to lower resolution step by step (4K to 1440p to 1080p) if performance is unstable. Select the resolution at which you get at least 60fps with ray tracing turned on. Use tools like MSI Afterburner for monitoring GPU workload. If GPU runs above 95% constantly, scale back ray tracing or resolution.
- Use frame rate cap (e.g., 60 FPS) to reduce spikes and maintain consistent performance. FPS cap limit option is only available in the modern games. I won’t suggest this option if you have a weak graphics card in your system.
- Use Hardware Scheduling (available in Windows) for improved frame pacing.
5. Monitor GPU Temperature & Cooling Efficiency
Ray traicng puts heavy workload on your GPU, which raises temperatures and results in issues like thermal throttling. To maintain performance, montior the GPU temperature using tools like MSI Afterburner, HWMonitor, or GPU-Z.
Ray tracing rendering puts heavy workload on the GPU. Therefore, it’s important to keep temperatures below 85°C. Most graphics cards perform best between 70–80°C under ray tracing workloads.
Stress test your system using tools like 3DMark, Cinebench, or 3DMark with ray tracing turned on. Monitor if fans ramp up and temps stabilize during at full workload.
Ray tracing stresses your GPU to generate more heat. Therefore it’s adviseable to have a proper airflow system on your machine. Add more fans if necessary to avoid heat build inside the PC chassis.
Clean fans, filters, and heatsinks every few months if you rely too heavily on ray tracing.
6. Upgrade Key Hardware for Ray Tracing (GPU, CPU, RAM, PSU)
Upgrade key hardware GPU, CPU, RAM, to improve ray tracing performance on your gaming PC.
GPU is the powerhouse of ray tracing. Choose a GPU that comes with a lot of RT cores. The more RT cores you have on a GPU, the better ray tracing performance you’ll get in games.
Recommended GPUs for Ray Tracing:
- NVIDIA RTX 3060 or higher
- AMD RX 6700 XT or higher
While RT is GPU-bound, weak CPUs cause bottlenecks. Pair a 6-core or 8-core CPU with high single-core performance.
Ray-traced games load more assets into RAM. Therefore, choose a low-latency, high-speed, and beefy RAM at this stage. For seamless ray tracing support, I would suggest you to go with at least 32GB DDR5 RAM.
Ray tracing draws more power, especially during peak workloads. Make sure you have a high-wattage power supply (at least 650W) to fuel your graphics card.
7. Adjust Resolution Scaling & Anti-Aliasing
Adjusting resolution scaling and anti-aliasing helps maintain frame rate and image quality, thus offloading workload from GPU. With DLSS/FSR active, disable TAA, FXAA, or MSAA.
8. Configure Power Settings in Windows and BIOS
Configuring power in Windows and BIOS significantly improves ray tracing performance on a gaming PC.
Go to Control Panel > Power Options → select High Performance or Ultimate Performance (on Pro editions). This prevents downclocking during ray tracing loads.
Similarly, you can increase the RAM speed or overclock your CPU to gain maximum fps with ray tracing effects turned on.
9. Disable Background Apps
Close any unnecessary app in the background to save system resources. Apps running in the background use CPU and RAM, resulting in slower gaming performance. Therefore, disable browsers, messengers, music, video, file download, etc to free up system resources.
I use Windows Task Manager to disable any unwanted background application.
Common Ray Tracing Issues & How to Fix Them
Below are the most common you can come up with during gameplay.
System crashes or stuttering
Crashes or stuttering usually occurs due to insufficient system resources. Refer to in-game settings section above to fix this problem. Alternatively, you can cut down on ray tracing in-game settings to overcome this issue.
Overheating during extended sessions
You GPU or CPU can overheat with ray tracing turned on. If this happens, check the GPU or CPU fan. If the fans are running, then add more case fans to improve airflow within your PC chassis.
Driver incompatibility or bugs
This can easily be fixed by updating your GPU drivers. Go to official website of your graphics card and download the latest drivers to fix any bugs or errors.
Game not detecting ray tracing hardware
If games aren’t detecting ray tracing hardware, follow the steps below to fix this probelm:
- Check if your graphics card natively supports ray tracing. RTX 2000 or higher, AMD RX 6000 or higher card
- Ray tracing needs DirectX 12. Select DirectX 12 from the in-game settings.
- Make sure your graphics card drivers are up to date.
- Use Windows 10/11 64-bit.
- Some game titles require RT to be turned on manually. Turn on the ray tracing option from the in-game settings.
Mosaab Jamal Ahmed brings 12+ years of PC Hardware experience to the table. His journey began in 1998 with a Pentium 1 PC, igniting his lifelong fascination with computer hardware and video games. Over the years, Mosaab has honed his skills in upgrading and building gaming PCs. He has built dream gaming machines for multiple brands and local businesses throughout his career. Mosaab’s areas of expertise are building custom gaming PCs, in-depth PC hardware analysis, and PC hardware reviews.