Nvidia claims future GPUs will deliver 1 million times better path tracing performance using AI

Nvidia claims 1 million times better path tracing performance is coming in future gaming GPUs -- says current GPUs are already 10,000x faster than Pascal

Despite increasing competition from Intel and AMD, Nvidia's RTX lineup remains the best hardware for ray tracing and path tracing in games. Ever since Turing, RTX 20 series, the company has made significant strides -- mostly leveraging AI and neural rendering -- to increase graphical fidelity without compromising performance. Now, at GDC 2026, it's claiming that the future holds an even more impressive milestone. During the presentation, John Spitzer (Dev & Performance VP) presented a line graph that plotted the progress of ray tracing and path tracing performance in Nvidia's gaming GPUs. At the far-left corner, we see Pascal, aka the legendary RTX 10 series, which came out a decade ago. Comparing that to today's Blackwell GPUs (RTX 50), the path tracing performance has apparently improved by 10,000 times already. That's largely due to a focus on hardware-accelerated neural rendering enabled by dedicated RT and Tensor cores that handle machine learning inside Nvidia GPUs. Features like DLSS are entirely reliant on AI; the ability to piece together frame data more accurately in both upscaling and frame-gen situations is only possible due to models trained on Nvidia's supercomputers. Spitzer says that Moore's Law is dead and that silicon advancements alone wouldn't be enough to generate photorealistic visuals in his lifetime. Nvidia wants to achieve a level of graphical fidelity that's indistinguishable from real life, but that would require a "hundred or thousand times more computational power" -- this is where AI becomes the catalyst. In the future, AI advances will take gaming GPUs to 1,000,000 times better path tracing performance when compared to the RTX 10 series. Newer, faster, more efficient hardware blocks will basically make neural rendering the default going forward, as already claimed by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Games would "look like a film" while still running smoothly due to multiple frames being interpolated in real-time by AI. None of this is a revelation -- of course, things are supposed to get better over time -- but the wait might not be too long. The next-gen Rubin GPUs from Nvidia, slated to launch sometime between 2027 and 2028, could usher in this 1-million-times better path tracing reality. The list of games supporting path tracing is already growing at a rapid pace, with Resident Evil Requiem being the latest addition. As such, the presentation also included some bits about new path tracing technologies, such as ReSTIR (recent spatiotemporal resampling algorithms) and RTX Mega Geometry. To showcase this, Nvidia brought a tech demo for Witcher 4 with over two trillion triangles in the scene, depicting realistic foliage and lighting simultaneously. Make sure to check out the video linked above for more details. Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds.

Blackwell's path tracing is 10,000x better than Pascal, claims Nvidia...and future GPUs will be 1,000,000x better

* GTX 1080 (Pascal) nears its 10th birthday, and Nvidia is comparing its performance with its newer Blackwell GPUS. * Nvidia says its Blackwell GPUs achieve 10,000x path tracing vs Pascal, and wants to achieve 1,000,000x using AI. * Nvidia believes that using AI to dodge Moore's Law will enable film-like visuals in the future. I don't mean to make you feel old, but the Nvidia GTX 1080 based on Pascal is approaching its tenth birthday. Back in May 2026, gamers were putting the new card in their desktop PCs and pushing the card to its limits using games like Fallout 4 and GTA 5. GPU tech has come a long way since then, and now people are running GTA 5 on their integrated graphics chips. Maybe not the best experience, but it does work, apparently. But just how much have Nvidia's GPUs improved in almost ten years? Well, the company has claimed that Blackwell GPUs perform path tracing 10,000x better than Pascal. Not only that, but it believes we'll see a 1,000,000x improvement in the future thanks to AI tools. Path tracing is slowly becoming a non-negotiable for me, and it wouldn't be possible without DLSS Never thought I'd say this, but if it's got path tracing, I want it on. Posts 14 By Samarveer Singh Nvidia wants to achieve 1,000,000x better path tracing performance in future GPUs It claims it has already come a long way As spotted by Tom's Hardware, Nvidia's Dev & Performance VP John Spitzer took to the stage during GDC 2026 to talk about the future of game development. As part of his talk, he showed off a chart (shown at 4:17 in the above video) which claimed that the Blackwell GPUs we have today have "10,000x path tracing performance" over the Pascal GTX 10 series that was released back in 2016. Not only that, but the chart also stated that Nvidia hopes to achieve "1Mx path tracing performance" in the future. Spitzer claims that this advancement would be made possible due to AI. Claiming that "Moore's Law is dead," Spitzer says Nvidia won't rely on hardware advancements to squeeze more power out of its GPUs; instead, Nvidia will put the burden on AI tools. This, Spitzer hopes, will allow for games that "look like a film" without suffering a huge performance hit, all because AI will be working in the background to make a dependable framerate with no loss in quality possible. Subscribe to the newsletter for expert GPU and AI insight Get clearer context by subscribing to our newsletter: in-depth analysis of GPU and AI-driven graphics claims like massive path-tracing gains, plus expert perspective to help you judge whether the hype matches the hardware. Get Updates By subscribing, you agree to receive newsletter and marketing emails, and accept our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You can unsubscribe anytime. Is it wishful thinking? It's really hard to say at this point. However, if any hardware company is worthy of standing on stage and making claims as to how AI will enhance our gaming in the future, it's Nvidia. Still, this claim puts the discourse surrounding using AI tools with GPUs back into the spotlight; while some would argue that upscaling is democratizing high-end gaming for the 99%, others believe we're not being honest with ourselves about ray tracing.

NVIDIA Says Its Future Gaming GPUs Will Bring A 1,000,000x Leap In Path Tracing Performance By Using RTX / AI Advances

NVIDIA has teased its future GPUs with massive path tracing performance capabilities thanks to AI & RTX advancements, as Moore's Law is Dead. 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: 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.