A million times faster than the GTX 10 series: NVIDIA promises a future of graphics that will make even the RTX 5090 look obsolete

At the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2026, NVIDIA unveiled ambitious plans for the advancement of ray tracing technologies. NVIDIA's Vice President of Developer Technologies, John Spitzer, presented a roadmap detailing how GPU performance in ray tracing and path tracing tasks is projected to increase by a million times compared to current solutions.

The starting point for this comparison was the Pascal architecture (GeForce GTX 10 series), released nearly a decade ago. These graphics cards lacked dedicated RT Cores, and ray tracing was handled through software-based methods, making the technology largely impractical for real-time use in games. The landscape began to shift with the introduction of the Turing architecture (RTX 20) in 2018, which brought the first dedicated hardware blocks for lighting calculations.

Modern graphics cards built on the Blackwell architecture demonstrate roughly a 10,000-fold increase in path tracing performance compared to Pascal. However, according to company representatives, this is just an intermediate milestone. Spitzer noted that the industry's future progress can no longer rely solely on raw transistor power, with the primary focus now shifting to algorithmic advancements and neural rendering. NVIDIA estimates that the combination of new RT Cores, Tensor Cores, and technologies like DLSS 4.5—which can now "predict" 23 out of 24 pixels—creates a multiplicative effect.

It is through these factors that the company aims to achieve the million-fold performance increase in future gaming GPUs (likely with the Rubin architecture, expected around 2027–2028). The goal is to bring real-time in-game image quality closer to the level of feature films, where rendering a single frame can take hours.

GDC also saw the presentation of new technologies aimed at improving path tracing. These include ReSTIR (resampling algorithms for more accurate global illumination and realistic reflections), as well as enhancements in handling complex geometry, such as animated foliage. For the latter, Opacity Micromaps (OMOs) are utilized, allowing for the efficient processing of minute details like tree leaves.

Furthermore, NVIDIA has announced an expansion of DLSS 4.5's capabilities. Later this month, support is expected for MFG 6X mode (generating six frames instead of one) and a dynamic mode that adapts the technology's performance to the target resolution.

What do you think? Does the gaming industry need this level of ray tracing performance within the next 3-4 years, or do modern games and current hardware still have untapped potential? Share your opinions in the comments.