Why do mid-range phone chips struggle so hard with ray tracing?

02 Tem 11:00

I've noticed that even mid-range handheld devices can run modern games at playable framerates, but as soon as ray tracing is turned on, performance tanks like a stone. Is this just a hardware limitation, or does software optimization play a big role here? Would a significantly better cooling solution make any difference, or is it purely about raw compute power?