Published May 29, 2026, 5:00 PM EDT Hamlin has been in the tech field for over seven years. Since 2017, his work has appeared on MakeUseOf , OSXDaily, Beebom, MashTips, and more. He served as the Senior Editor for MUO for two years before joining XDA. He uses a Windows PC for desktop use and a MacBook for traveling, but dislikes some of the quirks of macOS. You're more likely to catch him at the gym or on a flight than anywhere else. I don't know if you still remember, but Nvidia made a big deal about ray tracing when it launched the RTX 20-series GPUs back in 2018. The company's CEO, Jensen Huang, even said, "Computer graphics will never be the same again." At the time, a lot of us bought into that idea. The demos did make it look like the next big leap for gaming, with realistic lighting, shadows, and reflections. Then, when games started coming out with ray tracing, we quickly realized how much performance we had to compromise to get those visual improvements.…