NVIDIA Boasts 1,000,000× Ray Tracing Leap—But Starts from Pascal

As GDC 2026 approaches, NVIDIA has not announced any new gaming GPUs or graphics cards (the RTX 50 SUPER series is officially dead), but it did share an interesting slide.

NVIDIA claims that the path-traced ray tracing performance of the Blackwell RTX 50 series is already 10,000 times greater than in the past, and in the future, it will rise to a staggering 1,000,000 times. However, NVIDIA did not specify when this would be achieved, and the claim comes with some caveats.

First, the baseline for these multipliers is not the first-generation hardware ray tracing cards (Turing RTX 20 series), but rather the Pascal GTX 10 series, which had no ray tracing engine and could only run software-based simulations. NVIDIA even explicitly labeled Pascal with “software ray tracing core” in the slide.

Second, the numbers are further inflated by DLSS frame generation. The latest DLSS 4.5 achieves up to 6× frame generation, meaning that out of 24 pixels, 23 are AI-generated rather than physically rendered. This is also counted as part of the performance boost. NVIDIA reiterated that “Moore’s Law is dead”