There are few shows of PC gaming opulence more conspicuous than rendering the glamorous spy fiction world of James Bond with cutting-edge path tracing, calculating nearly every single ray of light as it bounces through the environment. And today, you (theoretically) can, thanks to today's big update for 007 First Light. That is, assuming you've got a GPU that you could put down as the deposit on a house. Fortunately, I do, but even then, it comes at a real cost to performance.

If you're rendering at anything about 1080p, you'll likely have to rely on visual smoke and mirrors such as DLSS (the upscaling kind) to hit an acceptable framerate, even if you have a high-end PC. But I cannot deny the quality of the results. Just look at the screenshots and the before/after trailer below. While First Light was a (fittingly) gorgeously lit experience out of the box, path tracing really does make the world look and feel a lot more coherent and grounded. Full of little details that just kinda happen naturally when simulating how light functions in the real world.

While the store page's new tech-specs sheet says that owners of a 5090 (such as myself) can expect to see the game path-traced and running at a slick 200+ frames per second, that's with some spicy asterisks attached. It's relying on Nvidia's notoriously laggy, blurry 'multi-frame generation' tech. Fortunately, my monitor only goes up to 120hz, so if I can dial in a good image at a solid 60fps and generate the remainder, I should get a mostly coherent game, but that's a rich cocktail of technical trickery and corner-cutting. And if you want to render everything at a raw 4K? Good luck, as I don't think the hardware exists to do that yet.

There's still plenty to come as free updates for First Light. The studio recently unveiled their roadmap for the first year of updates. Several goodies have already arrived, such as today's path tracing mode and several new TacSim scenarios. On the horizon is a full New Game+ mode, and an epilogue story mission centered around modern-day pirate king Bawma (played by Lenny Kravitz). Here's hoping the game is enough of a success to keep things growing for even a fraction of the time that Hitman: World of Assassination has been growing.

That said, there's no mention or hints at a true offline mode for the game. Bizarrely, while you can play First Light's main story offline, you need to be online at all times to play the TacSim missions - a significant chunk of the game, echoing the many replayable escalations and challenge modes from the Hitman series. Here's hoping that changes, but I don't see it happening any time soon. That said, never say die.

The path tracing update is out now for 007 First Light, which normally costs a rather steep £60/$70, with a 20% discount expiring in the next few hours. But savvy shoppers can find it significantly lower elsewhere.