Has the 4K real-world test of *Substance of Existence* finally stabilized? Can path tracing really deliver?

Cool white light strips spread inch by inch along the bulkheads, the metal surfaces cutting human silhouettes into shards of reflection, like a frosted lake on a winter night—quiet, yet carrying a chill that makes you instinctively hold your breath. Whenever I see a sci-fi lab like this, my first reaction is never to fire a shot, but to find an angle that can capture the depth, lighting, and character outlines all at once. For a game like Pragmata, whether it makes you want to live inside it often determines the first impression sooner than a string of specs.

To be clear, the focus of this discussion is not the story, but its performance under 4K path tracing. As a sci-fi third-person shooter adventure game developed and published by Capcom, Pragmata blends hacking puzzles with traditional gunplay. It will launch first on PC, PS5, and XSX on April 17, then arrive on Switch 2 on April 24. With media reviews now unlocked, DSO Gaming specifically tested its path tracing and DLSS 4. The test platform was also seriously high-end: Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB DDR5 6000MHz, RTX 5090, running Windows 10 64-bit, with GeForce 595.97 drivers.

What is worth noting is that its ray tracing option restrictions are exactly the same as those in Resident Evil 9: Requiem. In other words, if you want to enable path tracing, you must also enable DLSS 4 and Ray Reconstruction; conversely, if you only turn on traditional ray tracing, you cannot enable Ray Reconstruction. This kind of binding is like a beautifully designed automatic door: if you want to enter the best lighting range, you have to follow the route it sets.

Because the game does not include a built-in benchmark tool, DSO Gaming chose a relatively performance-heavy early-game scene for testing. At native 4K with DLAA, after enabling path tracing, the minimum frame rate was 29FPS, with an average of 31FPS. That figure is acceptable for a pure visual showcase, but if you actually want to play, it is obviously not smooth enough. Once switched to DLSS 4 “Quality” mode, however, the frame rate can approach 60FPS; with Frame Generation added, it reaches around 100FPS, while Multi Frame Generation X3 and X4 push it further to about 150FPS and 190FPS respectively.

What I care about most in this set of data is not actually how high it can go, but how stable it is. The foreign media outlet noted that the base frame rate itself sits between 53FPS and 58FPS, so Multi Frame Generation does not introduce especially noticeable input latency, and overall stability is even above average. There is still a little slight ghosting when quickly swinging the camera, but it is the kind of thing most people may not notice during normal play. Returning to the game itself, if a title centered on futuristic spaces, metallic materials, and complex reflections can still preserve that cold, crisp sense of atmosphere while in motion, then its technical solution has at least not broken the mood.

Beyond the visuals, however, this test also conveniently offers players a very practical purchasing suggestion: if you are an RTX 5090-level user, enabling DLSS 4 Quality mode at 4K and adding Multi Frame Generation X4 will be one of the best ways to experience the path-traced version of Pragmata, provided that you ideally have a 240Hz or 360Hz high-refresh display. In other words, the ticket price for this “wanting to live inside it” sense of immersion is not cheap. For ordinary players, the more realistic approach is still to aim for the near-60FPS range with DLSS 4 Quality mode, so you can enjoy the lighting upgrade without having hardware pressure come crashing down like a blizzard.

Overall, Pragmata’s 4K path tracing performance this time is reassuring. Especially on a high-end graphics card like the RTX 5090, it is no longer merely “playable with it enabled,” but capable of finding a fairly elegant balance between high image quality and high refresh rates. For screenshot-compulsive players like me, sci-fi bases, experimental cabins, and lunar surface scenes like these already make it easy to stop and repeatedly frame a shot; if the lighting is stable enough on top of that, the feeling of wanting to stand still and look for a few more seconds really does emerge. It may not be a technical feast that everyone can enjoy in one step, but at least judging from this hands-on test, this coldly glowing future space is already starting to look like somewhere you might want to move into for a night.