Overview
- IO Interactive, which released the update Tuesday, shipped a full path-traced rendering mode for the PC version alongside NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction to improve lighting, shadows, and reflections.
- Path tracing is a single-pass lighting method that simulates light paths more completely than hybrid ray tracing and it produces more realistic indirect light and mirror reflections.
- Early third-party tests show the new mode is very demanding on GPUs, with one benchmark finding an RTX 5080 lost about 62% average FPS at 4K when path tracing was enabled.
- IO Interactive’s official path-tracing specs target GeForce RTX 5070 for 1080p, RTX 5080 for 1440p and RTX 5090 for 4K, and NVIDIA and the studio point to GeForce NOW cloud streaming as an alternative for lower-end hardware.
- The studio also delayed the Nintendo Switch 2 port to March 2027 to allow more optimization work, reflecting the same performance constraints that make path tracing costly on weaker systems.