Ray Tracing Causing Crashes or Poor Performance
What is this error?
Enabling ray tracing in games causes crashes, severe FPS drops, or visual artifacts. RT is demanding and pushes GPUs to their limits.
Common causes
- GPU driver bug with RT implementation
- insufficient VRAM for RT
- GPU overheating under RT load
- game's RT implementation buggy
- GPU doesn't have enough RT cores
How to fix it
- Update GPU driver
- lower RT quality
- disable specific RT effects
- ensure adequate VRAM and cooling
Too many steps? Crashless can diagnose this automatically — checks your drivers, temps, VRAM, and 400+ known error patterns.
Get free AI diagnosis Detailed analysis
Ray tracing makes games look incredible but is extremely demanding. If enabling RT causes crashes or drops your FPS below playable, here's how to handle it.
If RT crashes the game:
- Update your GPU driver — RT driver bugs are fixed frequently
- Start with RT on Low/Medium, not Ultra — Ultra RT can require double the VRAM
- Enable DLSS/FSR alongside RT — upscaling recovers the FPS lost to ray tracing
- Disable specific RT effects: some games let you enable RT reflections but disable RT global illumination (which is more demanding)
- Lower other settings to free up GPU headroom: reduce shadow quality, post-processing, volumetric effects
If RT tanks performance:
- RT Reflections: moderate performance impact, usually worth enabling
- RT Global Illumination: heavy performance impact, disable if FPS is too low
- RT Shadows: moderate impact, subtle visual improvement
- Path Tracing (full RT): MASSIVE performance impact, only viable on RTX 4080+ at 1080p with DLSS 3
- Check your GPU's RT capability: RTX 2060 = basic RT, RTX 3070 = comfortable RT at 1080p, RTX 4070+ = RT at 1440p with DLSS
- AMD's RT performance is generally lower than NVIDIA's — adjust expectations accordingly
When to seek help
If this error keeps happening after trying the fixes above, it may point to a deeper hardware or system issue. Consider professional help if:
- The crash occurs across multiple games or applications
- You see the same error after a clean Windows install
- Your PC is less than a year old (could be a warranty issue)
- You smell burning or hear unusual sounds from your PC
Or let Crashless do the deep analysis for you -- our AI checks drivers, temps, event logs, and 400+ known patterns automatically.
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