As hardware development advances, ray tracing becomes more and more viable for real-time. Even ray tracing for volumetric data is possible with interactive frame rates. The molecular visualization program VMD is about to be extended to use volumetric ray tracing to enhance the image quality. In this thesis I show the implementation of a volumetric ray tracer that achieves interactive frame rates. The NVIDIA OptiX framework is used as the foundation for the ray tracing. OptiX is a programmable ray tracing framework designed to help developers to build ray tracing applications. Volumetric ray tracing is implemented using direct volume rendering via ray marching. The problems of intersecting geometry and translucency are solved by casting further rays and good image quality is achieved using a local approximation for ambient occlusion. The results show that interactive frame rates are possible for standard desktop PCs. But with activated ambient occlusion only offline rendering can be used.