The FPS Review may receive a commission in case you purchase something after clicking a link in this text.
Supermassive Games has a brand new entry within the Dark Pictures Anthology out today, and on PC it happens to be one in every of the more technically demanding releases of the yr. Directive 8020 launched today on PC via Steam alongside PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, and the PC version ships with path-traced global illumination, DLSS 4.5 Dynamic Multi Frame Generation, and DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction. For those who own an RTX 50 Series card, that is one in every of the higher showcases for what that hardware can actually do. For those who own something older, prepare to make some compromises.
The setup: Earth is dying, the colony ship Cassiopeia crash-lands on Tau Ceti f twelve light years from home, and the crew discovers they are usually not alone. It’s a cinematic survival horror adventure within the Dark Pictures mold — branching story, meaningful decisions, single-player story mode or multiplayer co-op for as much as five players. Supermassive has been making this type of game for years, but Directive 8020 represents the studio’s most visually ambitious effort, built on Unreal Engine 5 with path tracing integrated from the bottom up.
Early performance data from DSOGaming, using an RTX 5090 with a Ryzen 9 7950X3D at 4K, paints an image of the present state of path tracing in games. Native rasterization without hardware ray tracing sits around 83 FPS average — totally playable. Enable hardware RT and DLSS 4 Quality and that drops to roughly 63 FPS. Flip on full path tracing and also you’re taking a look at averages within the 30s. Enable Multi Frame Generation x4 with path tracing and also you get well to around 120 FPS.
The takeaway is that path tracing in 2026 still requires frame generation to be playable at high resolutions on current-gen hardware, even on the very top end. On RTX 40-series and Radeon RX 9000-series cards — which represent the vast majority of readers here — the realistic play is hardware Lumen RT quite than full path tracing, which should deliver a far more comfortable framerate with the visual quality still ahead of rasterization. The sport also supports DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution across all RTX GPUs, including legacy 20 and 30-series hardware.
Directive 8020 lands today at a $49.99 MSRP on Steam, with a Deluxe Edition upgrade available for pre-orders. NVIDIA’s latest GeForce Game Ready 596.49 WHQL driver is optimized for the title and is value grabbing ahead of your first session. Tell us within the comments in case you’re picking this one up.