007 First Light on PC now has full path tracing and DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction. IO Interactive announced the update on 15 September and published separate system requirements for the new mode. The headline: path tracing is aimed only at GeForce RTX 50 cards, with an RTX 5070 as the minimum for 1080p at 60 fps and an RTX 5090 with 32 GB of video memory listed for 4K.
What the update added
- Path tracing. Lighting, shadows and reflections are now path traced. The studio promises more detailed lighting and more cinematic levels.
- DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction. A neural network instead of traditional denoisers. It switches on automatically in path tracing mode.
- Already in the game. DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution and Dynamic Multi Frame Generation have been there since launch.
- Driver. Support is listed in GeForce Game Ready 616.92 WHQL from 9 September.
Path tracing requirements
IO Interactive splits the mode into three tiers. All three list NVIDIA cards only, and Ray Reconstruction is enabled automatically.
- Minimum, 1080p at 60 fps. Path tracing on Medium, GeForce RTX 5070, at least 12 GB of video memory, Core i5-13500 or Ryzen 5 7600, 16 GB of RAM.
- Recommended, 1440p at 60 fps. Path tracing on Medium, GeForce RTX 5080, at least 16 GB of video memory, same CPU, 16 GB of RAM.
- Top tier, 4K at 200+ fps with DLSS 4.5. Path tracing on High, GeForce RTX 5090, 32 GB of video memory, Core i5-13600K or Ryzen 7 7700X, 32 GB of RAM.
- In every case. 80 GB on an SSD, Windows 10 or 11.
For comparison, without path tracing the same 1080p at 60 fps needs only an RTX 3060 Ti with 8 GB, and 1440p at 60 fps an RTX 4070 or Radeon RX 7800 XT. So path tracing raises the bar by a whole generation and leaves Radeon out entirely. In the Steam announcement the studio mentions up to 280 fps, and NVIDIA's screenshot shows 276 fps with DLSS 4.5 and path tracing on. Numbers like that come with frame generation, so most of those frames are not rendered by the game directly.
Radeon owners got something from this update without any announcement. According to OC3D, the patch quietly added AMD FSR 4.1 support, even though at launch 007 First Light only had FSR 3.1 and the driver-level FSR 4 upgrade did not work. Neither IO Interactive nor AMD has mentioned it, so check the upscaler setting yourself. Path tracing itself remains GeForce RTX only.
How DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction improves on the old version
Real-time path tracing produces a noisy image because there are few rays per pixel. That noise used to be cleaned up by traditional denoisers, which smeared lighting in motion and lost detail. Ray Reconstruction replaces them with a neural network, and version 4.5 uses a second-generation transformer model. According to NVIDIA at gamescom 2026, it has 35% more compute and 20% more parameters than the previous model, with more accurate lighting and a steadier image in motion. It runs on every GeForce RTX card, but going by the requirements, path tracing in 007 First Light is aimed at RTX 50.
Without a suitable card, the cloud is the fallback: according to NVIDIA, the version with path tracing and DLSS 4.5 is available on GeForce NOW for Ultimate members. IO Interactive's game launched on 27 May and had sold more than 4 million copies by late August, according to the studio.
Sources
The update release, the three path tracing requirement tiers and the up to 280 fps figure come from IO Interactive's announcement in 007 First Light's Steam news on 15 September 2026 and the official requirements table attached to it. Requirements without path tracing come from the same table, and the 276 fps screenshot was published in the same announcement. The description of DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction, the 35% compute and 20% parameter figures and GeForce NOW Ultimate availability come from NVIDIA's gamescom 2026 news of 25 August 2026, the driver version from NVIDIA's GeForce Game Ready 616.92 news of 9 September 2026. Sales of more than 4 million copies follow IO Interactive's announcement of 24 August 2026. The chart was built by us from the official requirements table. FSR 4.1 support per OC3D, not officially confirmed. The video comes from the official 007 First Light channel.
