GeForce RTX path tracing performance will be a million times faster in the future

Saying one thing is a million times more something than another thing is often hyperbole, but during a recent GDC 2026 presentation, NVIDIA's John Spitzer said exactly that when it comes to path tracing performance on future GeForce RTX graphics cards. Of course, this comes with a caveat: performance compared to NVIDIA's pre-RTX Pascal-era GeForce GTX graphics cards that lacked dedicated ray-tracing and AI hardware. Yes, it's all thanks to AI.

2

Real-time path tracing or full ray tracing is so demanding on GPU hardware that it's only possible thanks to a wide range of AI-powered rendering technologies such as DLSS Super Resolution, Frame Generation, RTX Mega Geometry, and more. As these features are available on the current RTX Blackwell-powered GeForce RTX 50 Series, NVIDIA says it has already achieved 10,000X faster path-tracing performance than in the Pascal era.

"If you look at the performance there with just a software RT core to today, where we have fourth-generation RT cores, we have third-generation Tensor cores, we have DLSS 4.5, which is able to infer 23 out of 24 pixels rendered," NVIDIA VP of Developer & Performance Technology, John Spitzer, said. "These are multiplicative, that you can multiply them all together to get a scaling factor that, combined with the algorithm, eventually gave a 10,000 times that we've improved the performance over the last 10 years."

On a modern high-end GeForce RTX 40 or RTX 50 Series graphics card, that translates to stunningly realistic, immersive 1440p and 4K cinematic lighting and visuals in games like Resident Evil Requiem, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Alan Wake 2, Cyberpunk 2077, and more. However, NVIDIA's John Spitzer added, "We're still not where we want to be. We want the real-time images to look indistinguishable from reality. We want them to look like a film."

Naturally, this means more AI for rendering and new technologies like ReSTIR (Recent spatiotemporal resampling algorithms), along with other advances that will ultimately lead to a 1,000,000X improvement in path-tracing performance on future GeForce RTX hardware compared to the non-AI Pascal generation.