An evaluation of a ray‐tracing volume source formulation of wave scattering is presented. The basis of the formulation is to combine the physically realistic interpretation of propagation as rays with an exact diffractive representation of scattering such as the volume source formulation. The formulation has been used previously in inverse scattering but an evaluation of its accuracy has not been performed for the corresponding direct problem. In this paper the formulation of the technique is formally presented and a numerical evaluation of its accuracy is performed. Results are provided for a variety of cylindrical objects and comparisons are presented with exact results and also results from the Born approximation. The results indicate that indeed dramatic improvements over the Born approximation are possible.