TheRetroArcade
Veteran
Posts: 1,961
Joined: Feb 2026
Joined: Feb 2026
Ray tracing? Pffft, easy peasy now.
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With the launch of Capcom's Resident Evil Requiem, PC gamers can add another game to their libraries that sports one of the most impressive and most inaccessible of rendering technologies: path tracing (or full ray tracing, as Nvidia prefers to call it). If you want pixel-perfect lighting, shadows, and reflections, only path tracing will do, but the entry fee to all that glorious graphical wizardry is incredibly high.
And by that, I mean fiscally and physically. For example, while any RTX graphics card is capable of handling path tracing in today's games, unless it has lots of shader units, cache, and VRAM, the whole thing will be an epic slideshow of single-digit frame rates.
Okay, so that's a bit of an exaggeration because it's certainly double-digit on the humble old RTX 3060 Ti, which sports 4,864 shaders but only has 4 MB of L2 cache and 8 GB of video memory. The problem is that while it runs, the performance is nowhere near as good as Requiem's other two ray tracing options.
It's a bit of a long video, but you can always skip ahead to the relevant parts, as it's roughly equal for no ray tracing, normal and high RT, and path tracing. All of the footage was captured at 1440p, with the Normal quality preset and DLSS Quality enabled.
As you can see, the frame rate absolutely tanks with path tracing, whereas it's absolutely fine with 'just' ray tracing. I suppose the fact that it runs path tracing at all is impressive enough, but you're obviously not going to be using it, unless you're out to set some kind of bizarre record of speed-running Requiem at 15 fps.
Now, before anyone mentions the fact that the RTX 3060 Ti is several generations old, and therefore shouldn't be expected to handle path tracing at a playable frame rate, the same thing happens with an RTX 4070, as you can see below.
That graphics card can churn out triple-digit performance figures with high ray tracing enabled, but its output speed also plummets once path tracing is switched on. It's clearly nowhere near as bad as with the RTX 3060 Ti, but it does have almost double the compute performance as the old chip, as well as heaps more cache and VRAM.
Unfortunately, Resident Evil Requiem won't let you use frame generation with path tracing on the RTX 3060 Ti (possibly some shader conflict going on), but you can with the RTX 4070, as it ha...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
What do you think about this?
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Every Thursday
GTA 6 O'clock
Our special GTA 6 newsletter, with breaking news, insider info, and rumor analysis from the award-winning GTA 6 O'clock experts.
Every Friday
Knowledge
From the creators of Edge: A weekly videogame industry newsletter with analysis from expert writers, guidance from professionals, and insight into what's on the horizon.
Every Thursday
The Setup
Hardware nerds unite, sign up to our free tech newsletter for a weekly digest of the hottest new tech, the latest gadgets on the test bench, and much more.
Every Wednesday
Switch 2 Spotlight
Sign up to our new Switch 2 newsletter, where we bring you the latest talking points on Nintendo's new console each week, bring you up to date on the news, and recommend what games to play.
Every Saturday
The Watchlist
Subscribe for a weekly digest of the movie and TV news that matters, direct to your inbox. From first-look trailers, interviews, reviews and explainers, we've got you covered.
Once a month
SFX
Get sneak previews, exclusive competitions and details of special events each month!
With the launch of Capcom's Resident Evil Requiem, PC gamers can add another game to their libraries that sports one of the most impressive and most inaccessible of rendering technologies: path tracing (or full ray tracing, as Nvidia prefers to call it). If you want pixel-perfect lighting, shadows, and reflections, only path tracing will do, but the entry fee to all that glorious graphical wizardry is incredibly high.
And by that, I mean fiscally and physically. For example, while any RTX graphics card is capable of handling path tracing in today's games, unless it has lots of shader units, cache, and VRAM, the whole thing will be an epic slideshow of single-digit frame rates.
Okay, so that's a bit of an exaggeration because it's certainly double-digit on the humble old RTX 3060 Ti, which sports 4,864 shaders but only has 4 MB of L2 cache and 8 GB of video memory. The problem is that while it runs, the performance is nowhere near as good as Requiem's other two ray tracing options.
It's a bit of a long video, but you can always skip ahead to the relevant parts, as it's roughly equal for no ray tracing, normal and high RT, and path tracing. All of the footage was captured at 1440p, with the Normal quality preset and DLSS Quality enabled.
As you can see, the frame rate absolutely tanks with path tracing, whereas it's absolutely fine with 'just' ray tracing. I suppose the fact that it runs path tracing at all is impressive enough, but you're obviously not going to be using it, unless you're out to set some kind of bizarre record of speed-running Requiem at 15 fps.
Now, before anyone mentions the fact that the RTX 3060 Ti is several generations old, and therefore shouldn't be expected to handle path tracing at a playable frame rate, the same thing happens with an RTX 4070, as you can see below.
That graphics card can churn out triple-digit performance figures with high ray tracing enabled, but its output speed also plummets once path tracing is switched on. It's clearly nowhere near as bad as with the RTX 3060 Ti, but it does have almost double the compute performance as the old chip, as well as heaps more cache and VRAM.
Unfortunately, Resident Evil Requiem won't let you use frame generation with path tracing on the RTX 3060 Ti (possibly some shader conflict going on), but you can with the RTX 4070, as it ha...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
What do you think about this?