Don't worry about what the preset says. The only thing about the highest settings is that from memory you can't use ray reconstruction (which is more advanced than "normal" path tracing) without DLSS being switched on. So you need to make a choice between the best lighting the game has to offer and the best overall visual quality. The side effects of DLSS are much less noticeable at 1440p and 4k. But at 1080p it has a quite pronounced effect on visual quality in the sense of softness requiring a lot of sharpening and some artefacting.
That's not entirely accurate.
Ray Reconstruction isn't a more advanced form of Path Tracing. PT is an advanced form of ray tracing. RR isn't ray tracing, it's denoising.
Ray Reconstruction's main aim is to remove the visual noise that Ray tracing naturally causes. Unless a patch changed that, RR cannot be turned on without DLSS as it is part of DLSS. RR is supposed to be a better denoiser than traditional methods of denoising (spatial and temporal) but people are divided on it since it has it's own set of side effects.
Path tracing will produce the best graphic fidelity. RR is meant to further improve it by providing better quality denoising but the actual light ray simulation comes from ray tracing/path tracing.
With that said, OP, without knowing what kind of hardware you upgraded to it's hard to say whether you should turn on DLSS or not.
The reality is that unless you are playing at 1080p, without an RTX 4080ti or better, the performance hit from turning PT on and DLSS off is probably not worth it. At 4K resolution, DLSS set to quality will be barely noticeable but at least your game will run much smoother.
Whether you turn on RR or not is a very personal preference. In my experience it produces a crisper image but comes with additional ghosting, which I abhor, so I leave it off but others don't mind the ghosting and prefer the crisper image. Try it and see which you prefer.
