Despite growing competitors from Intel and AMD, Nvidia’s RTX lineup stays the very best {hardware} for ray tracing and path tracing in video games. Ever since Turing, RTX 20 sequence, the corporate has made vital strides — principally leveraging AI and neural rendering — to extend graphical constancy with out compromising efficiency. Now, at GDC 2026, it is claiming that the long run holds an much more spectacular milestone.
That’s largely as a consequence of a give attention to hardware-accelerated neural rendering enabled by devoted RT and Tensor cores that deal with machine studying 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.
Article continues below
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 newest information, evaluation, & opinions in your feeds.