Performance with Path Tracing

Path tracing is exclusive to NVIDIA RTX GPUs (we tested 30-, 40-, and 50-series)—it's completely grayed out on AMD. It requires DLSS to be active. Enabling path tracing also force-enables DLSS Ray Reconstruction—there is no way to use path tracing without it (and you can't use it without PT either). Frame generation was disabled for these benchmarks. The charts below show performance at all three resolutions with max settings, path tracing enabled, and DLSS set to Quality.

A striking anomaly shows up here: the RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB is dramatically slower than the 8 GB model at every resolution—53 vs. 71 FPS at 1080p (-25%), 35 vs. 48 FPS at 1440p (-27%), and 18 vs. 25 FPS at 4K (-28%). This pattern of 16 GB models underperforming their 8 GB counterparts also appears in the rasterization and ray tracing benchmarks, though the gap is much smaller there (3–10%). The cause is unclear—it could be a driver issue, a game bug related to VRAM allocation behavior, or an interaction between path tracing and the larger memory configuration.