During the GDC 2026which took place at the beginning of March, NVIDIA had notably mentioned the future, according to him, of path tracing. The subject has been talked about quite a bit, and in particular the demonstration of Mega Geometry Foliage System on a technical demo of The Witcher 4which Thibaut spoke to you about on March 10.
We’re almost a month later, and NVIDIA has finally decided to share more content on the subject to the general public. The firm has just put online a video of just over 59 minutes in which Martin Stich initially takes the floor, to give a lot of technical information, before giving way to Carmelo Fernandez-Aguera for a part focused on development. If you are a fan of presentations that go a little more in-depth on technologies. This is quite simply the complete retransmission of the presentation that was made during the GDC.
Martin Stich explains to us in particular that this technical demo represents an area of 25 km² of forest, containing around 60 million plants of 200 different species, including 1 million trees. He confirms that there was no streaming, the entire scene being well contained in the graphics card’s memory despite its complexity. The passage that should particularly interest you is the one on performance:
With DLSS in Quality mode (with Ray Reconstruction), a GeForce RTX 5090 would manage to render this “path traced” scene in 4K at 80 fps. A GeForce RTX 4070 would achieve this in QHD at 58 fps. Path Tracing is quite logically the heaviest task on this rendering, followed by DLSS and its Ray Reconstruction. Martin Stich insists that a card with 12 GB is more than enough for this technical demo, which would take up around 9 GB of VRAM in Windows’ eyes, all told.
