NVIDIA has teased its future GPUs with massive path tracing performance capabilities thanks to AI & RTX advancements, as Moore’s Law is Dead.
NVIDIA Says Moore’s Law is Dead, Will Rely On RTX & AI Advancements To Deliver Massive Performance Leaps In Path Tracing Performance With Future GPUs
During GDC 2026, John Spitzer (NVIDIA VP of Developer & Performance Technology) presented a path tracing roadmap that showcases the leaps that each of their GPU architecture brought. The roadmap starts with Pascal (GTX 10 series), which was released almost 10 years ago in April, 2016. The architecture was a revolution at the time, but featured a software RT core, so it wasn’t very usable for Path Tracing, let alone Ray Tracing.
The first architecture that brought Ray Tracing support was Turing (RTX 20 series) in 2018, and that saw the advent of DLSS and RTX. NVIDIA says that despite Turing and its follow-ups featuring better hardware capabilities for RT, they couldn’t have brute-forced their way to get a reasonable performance jump that allowed them decent performance for ray tracing. This is because Moore’s Law doesn’t scale as well as it used to.
So the company has to come up with advanced techniques, and DLSS, along with RTX advancements, slowly but steadily paved the way for NVIDIA. Today, Blackwell’s latest RT, Tensor Core, DLSS 4.5, & SDK innovations deliver a 10,000x path tracing performance bump over Pascal, but NVIDIA says that it still is not where they want to be.
The company states that Future GPUs are going to bring an even bigger leap, with a 1Mx (1,000,000x) improvement over Pascal. This might come as early as the next-gen Rubin GPUs, which are slated for a 2027-2028 launch, but how does NVIDIA get there? Well, the answer is simple, and mentioned above, by the same RTX advancements and by leveraging AI that has pushed them to where they are today.
So this was our GTX 10 series (Pascal) of product that was launched in April of 2016, almost exactly 10 years ago. 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.
These are multiplicative, that you can multiply them all together to get a scaling factor that, combined with the algorithm, eventually gave a 100-fold improvement for the number of rays used. You get a total multiplicative product of 10,000 times that we’ve improved the performance over the last 10 years. Now, we’re not giving up. We’re still not to where we want to be. We want that the real-time images look indistinguishable from reality. We want them to look like a film.
If we were to brute force, we don’t have that. Moore’s law is dead. We are not going to see a 100 times improvement in my lifetime in terms of silicon. So we’re going to be relying upon algorithmic ingenuity and fully leaning into AI to cross that chasm between what’s attainable now, with real-time graphics in games, and what’s attainable in film rendering. So I would say that Path Tracing is really the gold standard today in state-of-the-art rendering for games.
John Spitzer – NVIDIA VP of Developer & Performance Technology
And the list of Path Tracing titles keeps on growing with the following PT-enabled games coming this year:
- Resident Evil Requiem (Already Released)
- Pragmata
- 007 First Light
- Control Resonant
- Directive 8020
- Tides of Annihilation
NVIDIA is also announcing two brand new technologies related to Path Tracing, the first of which is ReSTIR (Recent spatiotemporal resampling algorithms). This is what NVIDIA calls the most accurate simulation of how light is transported within a scene (PT Global Illumination).
In the two examples, NVIDIA showcases how ReSTIR delivers accurate mirror reflections and global illumination within a scene, alongside detailed animated foliage.
Foliage typically is moving, swaying with the wind. And individual leaves can be moving. And it’s a huge amount of geometric complexity as well as depth complexity. Depth complexity is how many layers are represented in a scene at any given pixel.
And the depth complexity on some of these could be higher if you’re in a very rugged scene with a ton of leaves. Now, each individual leaf also can be completely unique. And so you need to be able to very efficiently trace a ray into that leaf so that you’re able to do it. And so we have a technology that we can do opacity micromaps, or OMOs. And this is essentially a cookie cut. And it allows you to then how not it’s hitting the leaf, or it’s actually passing.
John Spitzer – NVIDIA VP of Developer & Performance Technology
The other technology is RTX Mega Geometry, which is going to get an updated version in The Witcher IV. We talked more about this in our post here.
NVIDIA also talked about DLSS and how it went from a shaky start to over 800 supported games to date. It is stated that 90% of gamers now enable game, and thanks to Streamline, the technology is now being adopted in several games at a rapid pace.
Later this month, NVIDIA is going to offer DLSS 4.5’s MFG 6X mode, which will enable users to generate 6 frames, along with a dynamic mode that essentially changes the Frame-Generation mode based on the targeted resolution. We tried MFG 6X Dynamic mode at GDC, and the switching from different modes was instantaneous, and there were no stutters or frame pacing issues encountered during the change.
So a lot of cool stuff to expect from NVIDIA in the future, such as faster Path Tracing performance, advanced visuals, advanced upscaling and neural rendering techniques & more.
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