The Xbox Series X|S supports a graphics technology called ray tracing, which essentially simulates how light naturally behaves inside the game environment.
That makes for more realistic visuals, but it was too much for earlier consoles to handle. Thankfully, that is starting to change with the latest generation of consoles.
The custom AMD silicon inside the Xbox Series X|S has enough power to enable the use of this new tech, but we all know technical performance doesn’t mean anything if there aren’t any games to take advantage of it.
It has to be enabled by the game developers, so how many have actually added it into their games so far?
Which games feature ray tracing on Xbox Series X|S?
Short answer: It’s a short list, but growing
If you are looking to take full advantage of your Xbox Series X or S, you’ll want to know which games have ray tracing. Here are all the current Xbox Series X|S games that support ray tracing:
We will continue to update this list as more games are made available.
Software vs hardware-accelerated ray tracing
Here’s the thing – ray tracing isn’t a new technology. It’s been around since 1969, when Arthur Appel coined the phrase while working at IBM.
Think of light in the real world. Everything you see is because of light rays bouncing off them, and into your eyes. If you could trace every individual light ray back to its source, that’s ray tracing.
What is new is being able to do it in real-time, as it’s a very resource-intensive process.
Think of almost every movie you’ve seen since the 70s that had some level of computer special effects in it. Chances are those used ray tracing, and the computation for it was done offline, taking hours per frame of footage.
It wasn’t until the latest generations of computer graphics cards and consoles that hardware-accelerated, real-time ray tracing was possible.
Some video games, like Gears 5, use software-based ray tracing so the feature can work on any hardware. Some, like Metro: Exodus, need hardware like Nvidia’s RT and Tensor cores.
Ray tracing is here to stay
Now that the Xbox Series X|S supports ray tracing, as well as the current generation of graphics cards for PC, expect this list to grow. We’ll periodically update the list as we hear of more games that include the tech.
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