CD Projekt RED has unveiled at the GDC 2023 that the RTX Path Tracing Overdrive Mode for Cyberpunk 2077 will launch on April 11th. It will be a part of the Cyberpunk 2077 Update 1.62 and bring several improvements, including RTX Path Tracing, improvements in ray tracing performance, and most likely some general gameplay improvements.

While the precise details of the Cyberpunk 2077 Update 1.62 have not been announced, CD Projekt RED did talk about path-traced features at the "Cyberpunk 2077' RT: Overdrive - Bringing Path Tracing into the Night City (Presented by NVIDIA)" GDC 2023 session held earlier. Earlier, CD Projekt RED also talked about the support for Shader Execution Ordering, as well as some other improvements for the game.CD Projekt RED and NVIDIA already revealed some of the updates that will be coming with the RT Overdrive Mode, including:

• NVIDIA RTX Direct Illumination (RTXDI) gives each neon sign, street lamp, car headlight, LED billboard, and TV accurate ray-traced lighting and shadows, bathing objects, walls, passing cars, and pedestrians in accurate colored lighting;
• Ray-traced indirect lighting and reflections now bounce multiple times, compared to the previous solution's single bounce. The result is even more accurate, realistic and immersive global illumination, reflections, and self-reflections;
• Ray-traced reflections are now rendered at full resolution, further improving their quality;
• Improved, more physically-based lighting removes the need for any other occlusion techniques.

CD Projekt RED and NVIDIA have also talked about the support for Shader Execution Ordering (SER), which should also come with the next update. It optimizes GPU workloads by enabling efficient path-traced lighting, and, according to NVIDIA, by grouping shader threads that accomplish similar tasks and using SER to optimize DispatchRays calls in Cyberpunk 2077, they sped up overall GPU time by around 42 percent.

SER, together with the recent updated support for DLSS 3, both of which are only available on NVIDIA Ada Lovelace GPUs, make such things even possible.

As noted, the Cyberpunk 2077 Update 1.62 should bring additional gameplay improvements, but all eyes are on the RT Overdrive Mode with RTX Path Tracing. Unfortunately, CD Projekt RED or NVIDIA did not reveal any new trailers to show off RTX Path Tracing, but hopefully, April 11th is just around the corner.