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.

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