"Cyberpunk 2077" looks beautiful with path tracing - if your graphics card cooperates

"Cyberpunk 2077" is not the first game to demonstrate full ray tracing. "Minecraft", "Quake 2" or "Portal" have already shown how beautiful older games can look with the technology. The open-world action role-playing game from CD Projekt Red impressively demonstrates that path tracing is also possible in newer games. However, this requires a lot of computing power.

Path tracing and its limitations

Ray tracing has so far been used to calculate shadows, reflections and global illumination for a small number of light sources. Complete "ray tracing" - path tracing - models the properties of light from a practically unlimited number of sources. All lighting effects are therefore generated using ray tracing instead of classic rasterisation.

With rasterisation, it often happens that light shines through walls. This no longer happens with path tracing. Shadow maps are used to insert shadows during rasterisation. This costs a lot of resources and is time-consuming. Shadows are often missing as a result. This is a thing of the past with Path Tracing. In short: complete scenes are illuminated as in reality. Here is a video of what this looks like in 4K:

Nvidia calls the Overdrive Mode of "Cyberpunk 2077" a technology preview. The graphics card manufacturer worked closely with CD Projekt Red on the Overdrive Mode. This is intended to give an insight into what is possible with path tracing. The term "technology preview" also makes it clear that there is still room for improvement.

The future of graphics is resource-hungry

In an own preview, Nvidia itself demonstrates the current limitations of path tracing. With an RTX-4090 graphics card, the current top model, less than 20 frames per second (FPS) are possible in overdrive mode in 2160p resolution. In combination with the DLSS 3 AI upscaling technology, it is then around 100 FPS.

The technology preview shows that path tracing is the future. "Cyberpunk 2077" looks like a different game at certain points. What was foreshadowed with the introduction of ray tracing almost five years ago seems to have finally materialised: the step from last-gen graphics to next-gen graphics.

In a preview, the gaming magazine Digital Foundry shows the differences between overdrive mode, classic rasterising and the highest ray tracing setting to date, "Psycho". Even compared to Psycho mode, the differences are drastic. The latter still uses rasterisation for certain lighting and employs various ray tracing technologies. It is therefore a double hybrid. Overdrive mode uses "ReStir Direct Lighting" for direct lighting and "ReStir Global Illumination" for indirect lighting. This is explained in the video from DigitalFoundry.

In the first embedded video from Digital Foundry, an RTX 4090 with DLSS Performance Mode enabled achieves at least 60 FPS. In the article on Eurogamer.net, Richard Leadbetter from Digital Foundry writes that Overdrive Mode is made for the RTX 40 series cards. With an RTX 3080, however, he also got between 40 and 60 FPS in 1440p resolution and DLSS Balanced Mode. So if you have one of the high-end RTX 30 series graphics cards, you too can take a foray through Night City with path tracing. <p