CD Projekt Red has finally released its Cyberpunk 2077 Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode update, promising stunning new lighting effects, but it’s only specified to work on Nvidia GeForce RTX 4000 series and 3090 GPUs.
The new update’s biggest feature is a new Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode that has a completely overhauled ray-traced rendering option for stunning new lighting effects. The new mode uses a global illumination model for lighting rather than only using ray tracing for certain lighting techniques or light sources, resulting in a huge change in the overall look of the game, even when compared to its previous ray-traced lighting modes.
However, with this huge change in visuals comes a huge change in performance, as was highlighted when Nvidia showcased the Cyberpunk 2077 Ray Tracing Overdrive Mode in a recent video. In it, even an Nvidia RTX 4090 couldn’t maintain over 20fps in some scenes with this mode enabled at 4K resolution.
For this reason, the Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode included in this patch will only be available for RTX 4000 series cards and the RTX 3090, and even here the RTX 3090 will be limited to 1080p resolution. Better performance can be unlocked by turning on DLSS 2 or DLSS 3 but performance will still be very limited.
For users of other ray tracing-capable GPUs with at least 8 GB of VRAM (such as the Nvidia RTX 3070 Ti or AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX), a photo mode will be available, allowing you to render individual frames with the new lighting model but not play the game in real-time.
Originally scheduled to arrive in time for the launch of the Nvidia RTX 4000 series, the new update also brings with it Nvidia DLAA and Intel XeSS support. The former is a new AI-based anti-aliasing mode that requires an Nvidia RTX GPU, while the latter means that users can opt to enable Intel’s XeSS upscaling. The full update notes can be found on the game’s official website.
The stunning new Cyberpunk 2077 Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode effects can be seen in a video comparison by Digital Foundry that shows the significant changes between using fully rasterized lighting modes, the partial ray traced modes previously available, and the new Overdrive Mode.
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