GeForce RTX 5080 sees massive ray tracing boost via new DirectX tech
While dramatic performance leaps in ray tracing are rarely seen in actual gaming scenarios, Microsoft’s recent updates to the DXR (DirectX Raytracing) API are showing significant promise. Recent testing of the Clustered Geometry feature on a GeForce RTX 5080 has demonstrated a massive increase in ray tracing frame rates compared to traditional rendering techniques.
The testing, conducted by Google senior software engineer Osvaldo Doederlein, highlights the potential of Microsoft’s major DXR API update unveiled in late October. The update introduces two key innovations: Clustered Geometry and Partitioned Top-Level Acceleration Structures (PTLAS), both designed to drastically improve the efficiency of ray-traced rendering on modern graphics cards.
Clustered Geometry vs. Traditional Rendering
The performance difference observed in the stress test was stark. Using traditional ray-traced rendering techniques, the GeForce RTX 5080 struggled at a mere 1.4 fps, consuming 4,716 MB of VRAM, with rebuild times—the time required for the CPU and GPU to build acceleration structures around objects—sitting at 720 ms. Once Clustered Geometry was enabled, the frame rate jumped to 310 fps. Additionally, VRAM usage plummeted to just 267 MB, and rebuild times were slashed to 1 ms.
While ray dispatch time—the speed at which rays enter the rendering pipeline—saw a negligible increase from 1.8 ms to 2.0 ms, the overall impact on performance was overwhelmingly positive. The core benefit of Clustered Geometry lies in its ability to reduce the computational load of repeatedly building bottom-level acceleration structures (BLAS). It achieves this by breaking down the render into smaller clusters of triangles that can be reused as objects change due to animation or other variables.
Real-world expectations
It is important to maintain a healthy dose of skepticism regarding these numbers. While the gains in a geometrically simple test scene are phenomenal, they may not translate directly to complex, open-world game environments. NVIDIA has already introduced a similar technology called RTX Mega Geometry, which was shown in Gears of War: E-Day. In that instance, the feature demonstrated a reduction in VRAM usage by 2 GB and a performance boost of 6 fps on a GeForce RTX 5090. While the scale of improvement is much smaller than the DXR test results, any technology that reduces the computational footprint of ray tracing is a significant step forward for the industry.
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