How EA SEED's ORCA brings single-frame path tracing to high-speed games

I have spent enough time looking at real-time path tracing to know its dirtiest secret: it cheats. To make the lighting calculations viable on current GPUs, rendering pipelines rely heavily on temporal accumulation. They borrow lighting data from previous frames to fill in the gaps for the current one. If you are walking slowly down a static hallway, the illusion holds up perfectly. But put the player in a Formula 1 car doing 200mph, and that historical frame data is practically ancient by the time it hits the screen. The result is a mess of severe ghosting and smearing.

On July 21, during the SIGGRAPH 2026 rendering courses, EA SEED Senior Rendering Engineer Jon Greenberg detailed a way out of this temporal trap. His team built a proprietary technique called ORCA (Online Radiance Cache Acceleration) that drops historical frame data entirely. Instead of recycling past frames, ORCA generates single-frame voxel data structures on the fly. It splits the rendering workload by categorizing pixels into 'Sparse' seeding types and 'Reconstruction' reading types. This specific division allows the engine to hit high accuracy with very few seed paths. By calculating global illumination from scratch every single frame, the smearing vanishes.

The software engineering is impressive, but the hardware it runs on is what actually threatens NVIDIA's dominance in the ray tracing space. For years, NVIDIA has maintained a strict moat around high-end global illumination. If you wanted playable path tracing, you bought an expensive RTX card and relied on their proprietary silicon. Yet, at GDC 2026, EA SEED and Codemasters showed a working prototype of F1 25 running ORCA on a PlayStation 5 Pro. That means mid-tier AMD RDNA architecture is now handling a workload previously gatekept by premium PC hardware.

The performance delta is stark. When Codemasters tested a standard PC path tracing port of F1 25 on the PS5 Pro, it choked. Frame times hovered around 42.32ms, outputting a sluggish 20 to 24 frames per second. Dropping ORCA into the pipeline slashed those frame times down to 23.36ms. The game suddenly ran at 40 to 43 FPS, giving the developers enough computational headroom to lock the high-speed racer at a perfectly stable 30 FPS.

Getting a console to hit those numbers still requires aggressive upscaling. EA SEED paired ORCA with Sony's PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), rendering the F1 25 prototype at an internal resolution of 1080p before outputting to 4K. More interestingly for developers targeting performance modes, dropping that internal resolution to 864p allowed the path-traced demo to comfortably hit 60 FPS. For Sony, this is a tangible selling point. They can now point to a fast-paced, high-fidelity racing simulator running full path tracing at 60 FPS to justify the PS5 Pro's price tag to consumers.

EA SEED isn't treating this as a silver bullet. Industry analysis shows they are already testing ORCA in hybrid setups, running it alongside other caches like NVIDIA's SHaRC to manage different parts of the lighting pipeline. There are also rendering artifacts to iron out. Greenberg noted that 'fireflies'—stray, overly bright pixels—remain a persistent challenge, forcing developers to carefully balance lighting accuracy against GPU load to keep the image clean.

Despite the artifacting, proving that single-frame path tracing works on AMD console architecture gives developers a practical way to bypass NVIDIA's hardware dominance. Studios building high-speed action titles can now implement accurate lighting without sacrificing visual clarity in motion. For the consumer market, that means the decision to buy a premium PC over a console just got a little harder to justify.

References

• https://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2026/index.html
• https://gamemakers.jp/article/2026_08_06_142707/
• https://toot.thoughtworks.com/redirect/accounts/109622594052043059
• https://kivrai.com/gaming/siggraph-2026-rendering-advances-subtraction/
• https://techartnomad.tistory.com/831
• https://www.neogaf.com/threads/kepler_l2-amd-will-have-their-own-neural-rendering-in-rdna5-could-potentially-produce-better-results-and-be-more-performant.1701482/page-3
• https://media.contentapi.ea.com/content/dam/ea/seed/presentations/wihlidal-halcyonarchitecture-notes.pdf
• https://www.digitalfoundry.net/features/path-traced-f1-25-on-ps5-pro-codemasters-tech-demo-revealed
• https://wccftech.com/playstation-6-path-tracing-60-fps-rdna5-built-for-it/
• https://www.noobfeed.com/hardware/ps5-pro-path-tracing-console-graphics-ps6
• https://media.contentapi.ea.com/content/dam/ea/seed/presentations/syysgraph2018-moderngraphicsabstraction-realtimeraytracing.pdf
• https://www.reddit.com/r/playstation/comments/1swvxlg/ps5_pro_is_the_first_console_ever_to_be_capable/
• https://www.neogaf.com/threads/ea-showed-a-demo-at-gdc-with-full-path-tracing-on-f1-25-running-on-ps5-pro-at-30fps-1080p-upscaled-to-4k-with-pssr.1696182/
• https://post.smzdm.com/p/am9glv7p/
• https://ixbt.games/en/news/2026/04/27/411466-ea-zapustila-f1-25-s-trassirovkoi-puti-na-ps5-pro.html