Naraka Bladepoint is the latest game to add path-traced lighting, including real-time reflections and global illumination. We’ve already tested the base graphics settings, including upscaling and rasterized GI. The latest patch adds full ray-tracing (path tracing), ray reconstruction, frame generation, and multi-frame generation for RTX 50 series GPUs. The ray-traced lighting is still in beta (experimental).
Test Setup
- CPU: Intel Core i9-12900K @ 5.3 GHz.
- Cooler: Arctic Liquid Freezer III 420.
- GPU: NVIDIA RTX 4090 FE.
- Motherboard: MSI PRO Z790-P WIFI.
- Memory: 16 GB x2 @ 6000 MT/s CL30.
Resolution Scaling
Resolution drastically affects the ray tracing performance. With full ray-tracing plus TAA, Naraka Bladepoint averages:
- 46 FPS at 4K.
- 84 FPS at 1440p.
- 129 FPS at 1080p.
This indicates that multiple rays are being cast per pixel, improving the path tracing quality.
Running the same benchmarks with DLSS quality-mode upscaling reduces the deficit between 1080p and 4K from 180% to 138%. The game averages:
- 65 FPS at 4K.
- 117 FPS at 1440p.
- 155 FPS at 1080p.
Upscaling reduces the internal resolution, which decreases the ray count per frame.
Full Ray Tracing (Path Tracing) Performance
Full ray tracing cuts the frame rates in half, bringing down the average from 128 FPS to a mere 65 FPS at 4K, and that’s with quality-mode DLSS upscaling.
Disabling ray-traced reflections grants a 17% performance boost, while ray-traced lighting improves frame rates by 12%. The latter enables ray-traced global illumination, which accounts for diffuse lighting by implementing multiple bounce path tracing.
Ray-Traced Global Illumination alters the tone and lighting of the scene. It renders highly detailed ambient shadows and diffuse lighting, with light bleeding, and prevents light from leaking into enclosed spaces. Ray-traced lighting is most evident with vegetation, interiors, and occluded objects.
Ray-traced reflections are less obvious, mainly affecting smooth surfaces like water, mirrors, and metals. They have a limited range and produce artifacts when dealing with convoluted geometry. Distant-object reflections are rendered using screen-space data.
DLSS 4: Ray Reconstruction
Naraka Bladepoint uses DLSS 4-based ray reconstruction (Transformer Model), notably impacting performance. Disabling it makes the game 16-17% faster at the cost of noisy reflections and a drop in diffuse lighting quality.
The NRD denoisers used in place of DLSS ray reconstruction produce low-resolution reflections, prone to excessive noise and artifacting. It erodes finer geometric and color detail produced by indirect lighting.
Ray reconstruction is more instrumental with global illumination. Without it, distant shadows and diffuse lighting are often missing or incomplete, which reduces the light bleeding range.
DLSS 4: Upscaling & Frame Generation
Naraka Bladepoint now uses the upgraded transformer upscaling and frame generation model. Quality mode upscaling grants a 41% boost, 71% for balanced, and 110% for performance mode.
Ray reconstruction is essential at balanced and performance upscaling modes. It removes much of the noise, though blocky artifacts are partly retained.
Frame generation increases the gains over base upscaling to 70%, buoying the RTX 4090 to 114 FPS using quality mode and 162 FPS using performance mode. Strangely, frame generation doesn’t work with HDR.
VRAM Usage & CPU Bottlenecks
Naraka Bladepoint uses under 9 GB of graphics memory at 4K with path tracing, dropping down to 7 GB using upscaling. Lower resolutions limit the VRAM usage to 6-7 GB.
The path tracing pipeline is most GPU-oriented, so we didn’t observe any CPU limitations during our benchmarks.
