Supermassive Games has a new entry in the Dark Pictures Anthology out today, and on PC it happens to be one of the more technically demanding releases of the year. 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. If you own an RTX 50 Series card, this is one of the better showcases for what that hardware can actually do. If you 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 not alone. It’s a cinematic survival horror adventure in the Dark Pictures mold — branching story, meaningful choices, single-player story mode or multiplayer co-op for up to five players. Supermassive has been making this kind 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 ground up.
Early performance data from DSOGaming, using an RTX 5090 with a Ryzen 9 7950X3D at 4K, paints a picture of the current 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 you’re looking at averages in the 30s. Enable Multi Frame Generation x4 with path tracing and you recover 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 at the very top end. On RTX 40-series and Radeon RX 9000-series cards — which represent the majority of readers here — the realistic play is hardware Lumen RT rather than full path tracing, which should deliver a much more comfortable framerate with the visual quality still ahead of rasterization. The game 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 new GeForce Game Ready 596.49 WHQL driver is optimized for the title and is worth grabbing ahead of your first session. Let us know in the comments if you’re picking this one up.