Path tracing is now live in 007 First Light on PC, adding fully ray-traced lighting, shadows, and reflections to IO Interactive’s James Bond origin game. The feature landed alongside NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction, which turns on automatically whenever path tracing is active. Running it, though, means owning current Nvidia hardware.
Quick answer: Path tracing works only on Nvidia GeForce RTX 50 series cards. The minimum is an RTX 5070 with 12GB VRAM for 1080p at 60 FPS on the Medium path tracing preset.
007 First Light path tracing PC requirements
IO Interactive published three separate hardware tiers for path tracing, each tied to a specific resolution, frame rate, and preset. These are distinct from the game’s standard rasterized requirements, which start far lower on older GPUs. The CPU and memory jump only at the top Ultra tier.
| Requirement | Minimum | Recommended | Ultra |
|---|---|---|---|
| Target | 1080p at 60 FPS | 1440p at 60 FPS | 4K at 200+ FPS (DLSS 4.5) |
| Path Tracing preset | Medium | Medium | High |
| GPU | RTX 5070 | RTX 5080 | RTX 5090 |
| VRAM | 12GB | 16GB | 32GB |
| CPU | Core i5-13500 / Ryzen 5 7600 | Core i5-13500 / Ryzen 5 7600 | Core i5-13600K / Ryzen 7 7700X |
| RAM | 16GB | 16GB | 32GB |
| Storage | 80GB SSD | 80GB SSD | 80GB SSD |
| OS | Windows 10/11 64-bit | Windows 10/11 64-bit | Windows 10/11 64-bit |
The 4K, 200+ FPS Ultra target leans on DLSS 4.5 Dynamic Multi Frame Generation rather than raw rendering power. At native resolution the workload is far heavier, so upscaling and frame generation carry most of the frame rate at that tier.
Why AMD and Intel GPUs are excluded
The path tracing mode is built entirely around Nvidia’s RTX feature set, so no AMD Radeon or Intel Arc card is listed for it. The standard game still supports AMD hardware for rasterized rendering, but that support does not extend to the path-traced pipeline.
The technology stack pairs path tracing with three DLSS tools that share the load:
- DLSS Super Resolution lowers the internal render resolution to cut GPU work.
- DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction cleans up noise in reflections and shadows and switches on automatically with path tracing.
- Dynamic Multi Frame Generation raises displayed frame output on RTX 50 series cards.
How to enable path tracing in 007 First Light
You know it worked when the path tracing option appears and applies in the graphics menu on an RTX 50 series system. If the setting is missing, patch the game fully and update the driver, since both are needed before the option shows.
Playing path tracing without an RTX 50 GPU
If your PC or laptop lacks a supported RTX card, you can still run the path-traced version by streaming it. An Ultimate GeForce NOW membership renders the game on cloud hardware and streams it to nearly any device, keeping the full path tracing presentation intact.
Path tracing arrived after launch as part of IO Interactive’s ongoing work with Nvidia, built on an updated version of the studio’s Glacier engine. It sits as an image-quality option for players with the hardware to run it, rather than a baseline requirement for the game on PC, PS5, or Xbox Series X|S.
