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Our ray-traced gaming test suite includes five titles we’ve already seen that feature RT as extra eye candy, plus two modern titles that require RT support to run. We’ve also thrown in GTA V Enhanced as an older title that benefits from an RT-powered visual upgrade.
First, the TL;DR: none of the $300-or-less cards we’re testing today are great for RT, even at 1080p. You should really budget for a GeForce RTX 5060 Ti if you’re serious about RT experiences. Its leading performance in our test suite, as well as its 16GB of VRAM, make it ideal for tuning RT performance with upscaling and framegen.
DOOM: The Dark Ages
Why it's here: one of a new crop of games that requires RT to run
What it stresses: Compute, RT, VRAM
Even with mandatory RT support and everything but texture pool size cranked to Ultra Nightmare, DOOM: The Dark Ages isn't terribly hard for our stable of graphics cards to run well. The RTX 5050 comes in just shy of a 60 FPS average at 1080p and should serve as a fine foundation for DLSS-enhanced gaming if you prefer.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
Why it's here: another of a new crop of games that requires RT to run
What it stresses: Compute, RT, VRAM
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a weird beast. It uses a unique fork of the id Tech engine to deliver its cinematic adventure gameplay, and it doesn't necessarily play well with Nvidia graphics cards with 8GB of VRAM.
If you crank the texture pool size high enough or enable DLSS or MFG at the ragged edge of VRAM usage on GeForce cards, you're likely to cause an annoying hard crash—something we didn't see on any of our Radeon cards.
Even the RX 9060 XT 8GB will let you max out every setting without crashing, even if it might not run that well. We're surprised at how rough the user experience in this game can be on GeForces given that The Great Circle is an Nvidia-sponsored title.
Keeping texture pool size to a minimum and maxing out every other setting (save for path tracing) is totally possible in The Great Circle on these cards, and it only barely affects image quality, so that's how we tested.
The RTX 5050 clears a 60 FPS average in our test sequence, but as with other 8GB GeForce cards, its 1% lows fall lower than we'd like for a truly smooth experience. Still, the point stands: you can have a great time in The Great Circle even on affordable hardware at 1080p.
Alan Wake II
Alan Wake II's high RT preset enables some path-traced effects for extra eye candy, in theory, but they place quite the strain on this selection of hardware. The biggest issue beyond the crushing performance demands of these settings is that these effects don't really make a visible difference in this title, so you could just as soon ignore them and enjoy much higher frame rates.
Cyberpunk 2077
Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the few RT-heavy titles we've seen where enabling the feature creates major differences in image quality, so you might actually care about its performance on these cards. What we’re really looking for here is a solid foundation for upscaling, not a native 60 FPS.
Even by that measure, the RTX 5050 can’t even break 30 FPS on average with RT enabled. If you’re looking to enable RT in this title, you really want an RTX 5060 or RTX 5060 Ti 16GB for the best experience, and only then at 1080p.
Black Myth Wukong
Black Myth Wukong is tough on graphics cards even before we apply RT, and turning on “full ray tracing” takes performance below even the 30 FPS average on all but a handful of cards in our lineup.
RT does make a visible difference in this title, so it’s worth exploring if you’ve got the graphics card to match its considerable demands, but you really need an RTX 5060 or RTX 5060 Ti 16GB or better to even start considering enabling the feature.
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart
As an older RT title, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart plays OK even on more affordable hardware like the RTX 5050 with RT enabled at 1080p, but stepping up to 1440p increases VRAM pressure to the point that you really want a 16GB card (and more raw horsepower) to really get a good experience.
As with other RT titles in our lineup, though, Rift Apart doesn’t look that much different with RT than without, so unless you’re peeping pixels, you can just leave the feature off and enjoy higher performance.
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2
Enabling RT in Spider-Man 2 puts the hurt on any graphics card that doesn’t have 16GB of VRAM to play with, even at 1080p, and matters only get worse from there. Sorry to sound like a broken record, but if you’re playing this game on a sub-$300 graphics card, enabling RT really isn’t worth the performance hit.
Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced
It’s hard to believe we’re still testing GTA V more than 10 years after its arrival on the PC, but here we are. The latest Enhanced re-release adds appealing RT eye candy to Los Santos, and its demands on hardware are modest enough that even modest hardware can provide a solid enough performance foundation for upscaling.
We didn’t test the raster version of GTA V Enhanced as a baseline, as most any GPU can run it well. With RT maxed out, the RTX 5050 can’t crack 60 FPS on average, but it at least can provide a good baseline before you turn on DLSS (which you’ll want to do for the best image quality anyway).
Roll up all of our RT and raster results into one chart by the power of geomeans, and the RTX 5050 falls just a tiny bit behind the RTX 4060 and Arc B580, but not by enough to change any overall standings. What this analysis does emphasize is that you really want to step up to an RX 9060 XT 8GB, RTX 5060, or ideally an even higher-end card if ray-traced gaming is something you want to explore, as these cheaper cards fall just short of having enough oomph to deliver a solid baseline experience.
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