Testing path tracing across three demanding games, using NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 5080
Reviewed By: Charlie Noon
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Path Tracing was once a visual technology beyond the reach of gamers: cinema-grade lighting offering unparalleled immersion and eye-popping visuals. With the powerful range of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50-series graphics cards however, you can now enjoy this premium level of visual fidelity and still play your games at a decent FPS.
We got our hands on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 GPU and had a look at what we could get from it with Path Tracing enabled in three games: Resident Evil: Requiem, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and F1 25.
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To truly appreciate the immersion Path Tracing brings, you do need to experience it yourself while the game is in motion and the light changes around your character as they move through the world. That being said, we’ve taken some comparative images of scenes across three titles: once without any lighting effect, once with Ray Tracing switched on, and once with Path Tracing enabled – to help explain and illustrate the effects. Read on for everything you need to know!
What is Path Tracing?
The foundational tech for the improved representation of lighting in games over the last 8 years is Ray Tracing, which is what the abbreviated ‘RTX’ in front of NVIDIA’s GeForce graphics cards stands for. Ray Tracing essentially casts multiple ‘view rays’ from the camera/viewer’s perspective and models how light interacts with the objects these pass through, depending on the level of absorption, reflection, and refraction of the particular object, and relative to the sources of light around it.
Path Tracing is an enhancement of Ray Tracing technology that simulates light with a much greater degree of complexity, aiming to more accurately render how photons move and interact with the environment rather than just one solid ‘ray’ with a limited number of bounces. With Path Tracing, multiple bounces are rendered from the initial surface, and then off the multiple subsequent surfaces it collides with. This means global illumination and reflection effects that more accurately mimic how light behaves in real life, with light better filling spaces in games, more complex reflections being visible, and softer edges to shadows and shafts of light. The downside is that all these complicated computations are very intensive – requiring a powerful system if you want to use them in games and still have a playable FPS.
How DLSS, Dynamic MFG, Ray Reconstruction, and NVIDIA Reflex help with Path Tracing performance
Although the GeForce RTX 5080 is sufficiently powerful to render scenes in some games with Path Tracing enabled just by using raw raster performance alone, leveraging the latest AI tech features that the NVIDIA Blackwell series is blessed with helps to boost your FPS considerably. In many games, these features are actually enabled automatically once you turn on Path Tracing in the settings.
DLSS is a technology that first takes frames rendered by the GPU at a lower resolution and then turns them into a higher resolution image using AI – a much quicker and less intensive process than if the GPU had to fully render the image at a higher resolution to begin with. The latest version of this tech that’s currently available for those with NVIDIA 50-series cards is DLSS 4.5, which maintains visual quality through the use of extremely powerful upscaling models. For very demanding games like Cyberpunk 2077, turning DLSS on is a requirement if you’re going to enable Path Tracing.
Dynamic Multi Frame Generation (Dynamic MFG) is the latest generation of Frame Generation technology, which uses AI to completely generate frames from scratch in-between traditionally rendered ones, thus boosting your FPS considerably. With this mode, you can set a target frame rate and then it will generate a dynamic number of AI frames in between the traditionally rendered ones. As of 2026, 6x MFG is available in some games, which can boost FPS performance up to a maximum of six times in specific games! This obviously helps massively when running Path Tracing.
DLSS also features Ray Reconstruction, an AI-based denoiser that helps to clean up path traced images; producing sharper, more stable lighting, reflections, and global illumination, so is best turned on when Path Tracing is enabled.
Finally, to counter any additional latency NVIDIA Reflex is a latency reduction technology that reduces the input lag caused by frame generation pipelines, and is on by default when you use any level of multi-frame generation.
Enabling Path Tracing in Resident Evil: Requiem
Resident Evil: Requiem is a title where light and shadow are a core part of the game. The highly immersive, creepy environments are moodily lit throughout, with fear of the unseen being central to the experience, and moving between light and dark areas actually being a core gameplay mechanic at various points. As a result, it’s the perfect game to enjoy the additional fidelity that Path Tracing brings.
In our first set of comparative images, we’ve selected a fairly simple scene to illustrate one of the main features of Ray Tracing and Path Tracing. Without any of these enabled, the light at the end of the dark corridor stops fairly abruptly. With Ray Tracing enabled, you can see some reflection of light off the floor and walls of the corridor from the light source at the end. In the third image, with Path Tracing enabled, this reflection is much more extensive, with multiple areas where the light bounces off the walls and floor in a graduated way, with much more detail being visible as the light bounces off the dado rail and the ceiling.
Resident Evil: Requiem – Path Tracing ON (2)
Resident Evil: Requiem – Ray Tracing ON (2)
Resident Evil: Requiem – Ray Tracing OFF (2)
Our second set of images shows a similar scene, with more reflections when RT is enabled and even more with Path Tracing. Notably, with Path Tracing, there is an additional reflection of light that causes a shadow to be cast in front of Grace.
Resident Evil: Requiem – Path Tracing ON (hall scene)
Resident Evil: Requiem – Ray Tracing ON (hall scene)
Resident Evil: Requiem – Ray Tracing OFF
Finally, we have an outdoor scene in a rainy street with some neon lights. In the first you can see that the lighting around the man’s face and on the pavement beneath him is fairly flat. When Ray Tracing is enabled, a depth of shadow is added to the man’s face under the brim of his hat, and light visibly shines on the wet concrete floor, on the tablet to the right, and on the raised areas of Grace’s rain-soaked jacket. In the final image when Path Tracing is switched on, the whole area is suffused with the warmth of the light coming off the neon signs, and you can clearly see it bouncing off Grace’s hair and even more so off the wet ground.
Resident Evil: Requiem – Ray Tracing OFF (Shop front)
Resident Evil: Requiem – Ray Tracing ON (shop front)
Resident Evil: Requiem – Path Tracing ON (Shop front)
Below you can see the FPS we enjoyed on our RTX 5080 system when playing Resident Evil: Requiem on Max Settings at 1440p resolution. We first played the game using rasterisation rendering only, with Ray Tracing both off and on, but Path Tracing required the enabling of DLSS and Frame Generation to run, so we could not test for this in this section. After enabling DLSS Balanced Mode and Frame Generation 3x we tested with RTX Off, RTX On, and finally with Path Tracing & Ray Reconstruction jointly enabled.
| Resident Evil Requiem – recorded FPS at 1440p on Max settings | |||
| AVG | 1% | 0.1% | |
| Pure Rasterisation performance only | |||
| RTX Off | 133 | 115 | 105 |
| RTX On | 79 | 71 | 68 |
| DLSS Balanced, Frame Generation 3x enabled | |||
| RTX Off | 348 | 118 | 110 |
| RTX High | 277 | 94 | 89 |
| Path Tracing & Ray Reconstruction On | 186 | 62 | 59 |
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, with and without Path Tracing
Moving on to our second title: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Ray Tracing and Path Tracing once again helps elevate scenes from flatter lighting to a more realistic, film-like presentation.
In the first scene, we see little in the way of realistic reflections on the glass cabinets of the museum or on the polished floor when RT is completely disabled. In the second image, the broken glass on the right looks much more realistic, and the light beaming through the windows is clearly bouncing off the non-carpeted areas of the floor. In the final Path Traced image, the whole scene looks brighter and the lighting more soft as the light rays bounce multiple times throughout the room.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle – Ray Tracing ON (1)
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle – Ray Tracing OFF (1)
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle – Path Tracing ON (1)
A similar story can once again be found in this scene, with the light much more believably filling the corridor with RT switched on, and then even more so with PathTracing – adding warmth to the image and picking out additional details.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle – Path Tracing ON (2)
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle – Ray Tracing OFF (2)
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle – Ray Tracing ON (2)
We ran Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on Ultra Settings at 1440p, testing the same presets as we did above for Resident Evil, and once again were forced to switch on DLSS and Frame Generation to enable Path Tracing. See below for the FPS results.
| Indiana Jones and the Great Circle – recorded FPS at 1440p on Ultra settings | |||
| AVG | 1% | 0.1% | |
| Pure Rasterisation performance only | |||
| RTX Off | 202 | 181 | 165 |
| RTX On | 105 | 90 | 85 |
| DLSS Balanced, Frame Generation 3x enabled | |||
| RTX Off | 401 | 179 | 118 |
| RTX High | 311 | 132 | 122 |
| Path tracing & Ray Reconstruction On | 256 | 104 | 95 |
F1 25 with Path Tracing switched on and off
Finally we have the fantastic Formula One racer, F1 25. With RT switched on we see additional details in the roof of the car thanks to the reflected light. With Path Tracing enabled, even more detail is added, along with additional diffusion effects of the light as it passes through the water vapour in front and to the sides of the player’s car.
F1 25 – PathTracing ON (1)
F1 25 – Ray Tracing OFF (1)
F1 25 – Ray Tracing ON (1)
We see a similar thing in this sunnier scene – with the interior details of the cockpit becoming better illuminated and the shadows more complex, particularly with Path Tracing.
F1 25 – Path Tracing ON (2)
F1 25 – Ray Tracing OFF (2)
F1 25 – Ray Tracing ON (2)
See below for the FPS results for F1 25. In this game we were able to switch Path Tracing on whilst only using raster rendering, so we have also included this in the results.
| F1 25 – recorded FPS at 1440p on Ultra Max settings | |||
| AVG | 1% | 0.1% | |
| Pure Rasterisation performance only | |||
| RTX Off | 334 | 147 | 139 |
| RTX On | 215 | 91 | 85 |
| Path Tracing On | 155 | 59 | 56 |
| DLSS Balanced, Frame Generation 3x enabled | |||
| RTX Off | 441 | 148 | 140 |
| RTX On | 356 | 118 | 110 |
| Path tracing & Ray Reconstruction On | 305 | 100 | 91 |
Grab your RTX 5080 graphics card or prebuilt PC at Overclockers UK
Well, there you have it – if you want to unlock this level of visual performance, we recommend grabbing the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 yourself from Overclockers UK, who sell various AIB variants of the graphics card. If you don’t fancy putting together the rig yourself, the site also sells prebuilt PCs with this graphics card under their ‘PC Systems’ section.
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