By Hassan Mujtaba
Publication Date: 2026-03-13 07:30:00
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…
