Directive 8020 Benchmarks: Path Tracing, Ray Tracing, and DLSS 4 Performance

Supermassive Games' upcoming title Directive 8020 will support Path Tracing, Ray Tracing, and DLSS 4 on PC. The game's performance has been benchmarked on an RTX 5090, revealing significant differences between rendering modes.

RTX 5090 tested at 4K

At native 4K with Software Lumen, the game runs at 77 to 83 FPS. Enabling Ray Tracing at 4K with DLSS 4 Quality drops performance to 55 to 63 FPS. Path Tracing at 4K with DLSS 4 Quality is far more demanding, yielding only around 30 FPS. However, using DLSS 4 Multi-Frame Generation (MFG) can boost Path Tracing performance: MFG X2 reaches 62 to 65 FPS, MFG X3 hits 91 to 96 FPS, and MFG X4 achieves 120 FPS. For Ray Tracing, MFG X2 delivers 110 to 117 FPS, MFG X3 reaches 155 to 166 FPS, and MFG X4 tops out at 195 to 211 FPS.

According to DSOGaming, Path Tracing is extremely demanding and only the RTX 5090 can run it at playable framerates. The source notes that Path Tracing offers minor visual improvements over Ray Tracing at a huge performance cost, and most users may not notice the difference. The DLSS 4 Multi-Frame Gen implementation is described as solid with few artifacts, particularly in slow-paced gameplay.

A camera movement bug has been observed that causes framerate drops across all lighting methods, but the cause is unknown. Supermassive Games has not commented on this issue or announced a fix timeline.