• The GPU Burden: Your graphics card, especially its dedicated RT cores (on NVIDIA) or Ray Accelerators (on AMD), shoulders the primary load of tracing these rays. The more complex the lighting effects (Global Illumination, Reflections, Shadows, Ambient Occlusion), the heavier the hit.
• The CPU’s Role: While the GPU does the heavy ray lifting, the CPU is crucial for building the scene’s structure (using Bounding Volume Hierarchies – BVH) that the rays interact with. A weak CPU can bottleneck your powerful GPU, especially impacting minimum FPS and causing stutters.
• VRAM Hunger: High-resolution textures combined with the data needed for complex ray tracing effects can quickly fill up your GPU’s video memory (VRAM). Running out of VRAM leads to severe stuttering as data is swapped to slower system RAM.
• Bandwidth Matters: Shuffling all this complex lighting data between the GPU, CPU, and memory requires fast pathways. PCIe bandwidth and memory speed play supporting roles.

Gearing Up: Hardware Essentials for Ray Tracing (Beyond Just the GPU)

Yes, the graphics card is the undisputed star, but other components play critical supporting roles. Here’s a breakdown for different performance tiers:

The Graphics Card (GPU): Your Ray Tracing Workhorse

• The Reality: You need a dedicated RT-capable GPU. While older GTX cards (like the 1660 Super or 1080 Ti) technically support basic DXR 1.1, the performance is usually unplayable with RT enabled. Aim for NVIDIA RTX 20-series or newer, or AMD RX 6000-series or newer.