Wednesday, March 29th 2023
CD Projekt RED and NVIDIA Talk About Upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 Path Tracing
In an interview done by PCWorld's Gordon Ung at GDC 2023, CD Projekt Red's VP and Global Art Director, Jakub "Kuba" Knapik, and NVIDIA's Senior Developer Technology Engineer, Pawel Kozlowski, shed a bit more light about the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 Path Tracing update and what it brings to the game as well as what kind of hardware will you need to run it.
In case you missed it earlier, both CD Projekt RED and NVIDIA did talk about the RTX Path Tracing Overdrive Mode for Cyberpunk 2077, which will launch on April 11th. This will be a part of the Cyberpunk 2077 Update 1.62, which should bring additional gameplay improvements as well. It is worth to note that Path Tracing will be introduced to the game as a "technology preview," Jakub notes, as the developer is implementing this technology with NVIDIA and it is still a work in progress.
According to Jakub, the upcoming Path Tracing has a very different approach compared to Ray Tracing. While Ray Tracing did wonders and actually helped to solve certain quality and visual problems in games, like shadows, reflections and/or ambient occlusion, it did all those effects individually, while Path Tracing does them all at one in a single unified rendering, making the image more balanced, accurate, and way more beautiful. He notes that the technology is actually very close to the one used in the films and animation in previous couple of years.
Jakub describes the upcoming Path Tracing technology preview as a "technology of the future," making easier to develop games, nicer looking games, and actually shortens the time span needed to develop the game by speeding up production. While he was keen to note that you will need "a very high-end hardware to run it, he also calls it "hardware agnostic," suggesting it is not hardware limited, meaning you will be able to test it out on any "brand of the card you have," so it will work on NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel as well. Of course, since CD Projekt RED worked so closely with NVIDIA on this one, we suspect the GeForce RTX 40 series, specifically the RTX 4090, is the way to go.
NVIDIA's Senior Developer Technology Engineer, Pawel Kozlowski, gave more technical details about the Cyberpunk 2077 Path Tracing preview. Pawel notes that it is still using the NVIDIA RTXDI (RTX Direct Illumination) for computing all the direct illumination and using Path Tracing to compute the indirect part of the render, in a manner of speaking.
Pawel also adds that you will definitely need the GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs in order to use it, mainly, as he says, because they are the most powerful, and they support DLSS 3 with Frame Generation, as well as the support for Shader Execution Ordering (SER), which helps to execute incoherent workloads like Path Tracing.
While Jakub suggested that you will need very high-end hardware for the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 Path Tracing technical preview, Pawel also adds that NVIDIA is aiming for a good experience on 40 series GPUs, so it is left to be seen what kind of frame rates will we see from the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti.
Here is the full interview from PCWorld, and all we have to do is wait for the update to come out on April 11th.
Source:
PCWorld Youtube
In case you missed it earlier, both CD Projekt RED and NVIDIA did talk about the RTX Path Tracing Overdrive Mode for Cyberpunk 2077, which will launch on April 11th. This will be a part of the Cyberpunk 2077 Update 1.62, which should bring additional gameplay improvements as well. It is worth to note that Path Tracing will be introduced to the game as a "technology preview," Jakub notes, as the developer is implementing this technology with NVIDIA and it is still a work in progress.
Jakub describes the upcoming Path Tracing technology preview as a "technology of the future," making easier to develop games, nicer looking games, and actually shortens the time span needed to develop the game by speeding up production. While he was keen to note that you will need "a very high-end hardware to run it, he also calls it "hardware agnostic," suggesting it is not hardware limited, meaning you will be able to test it out on any "brand of the card you have," so it will work on NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel as well. Of course, since CD Projekt RED worked so closely with NVIDIA on this one, we suspect the GeForce RTX 40 series, specifically the RTX 4090, is the way to go.
NVIDIA's Senior Developer Technology Engineer, Pawel Kozlowski, gave more technical details about the Cyberpunk 2077 Path Tracing preview. Pawel notes that it is still using the NVIDIA RTXDI (RTX Direct Illumination) for computing all the direct illumination and using Path Tracing to compute the indirect part of the render, in a manner of speaking.
Pawel also adds that you will definitely need the GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs in order to use it, mainly, as he says, because they are the most powerful, and they support DLSS 3 with Frame Generation, as well as the support for Shader Execution Ordering (SER), which helps to execute incoherent workloads like Path Tracing.
While Jakub suggested that you will need very high-end hardware for the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 Path Tracing technical preview, Pawel also adds that NVIDIA is aiming for a good experience on 40 series GPUs, so it is left to be seen what kind of frame rates will we see from the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti.
Here is the full interview from PCWorld, and all we have to do is wait for the update to come out on April 11th.
23 Comments on CD Projekt RED and NVIDIA Talk About Upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 Path Tracing
As we just begun to reach somewhat good playability with RT-on at 4K 60FPS+ we now interduce a new 'hyper-ultra-eye-candy' level that is a must for any gamer*.
Get a life, CDPR, the game is still a shadow of what it should be.
But really, what did you expect, RT is in its infancy as far as consumer video cards are concerned. Think of shaders and how many iterations they went through for comparison.
I have no problem with the technical advancement, but I denounce the PR that come along with it to make you want it.
I`m sure that soon we will hear talks about "the real ray tracing" that you "must have" in your game, that is path tracing. That is, the RT we have now is a castrated demo and a lacking version of the 'real thing'.
Do you want to compromise with your gaming on the lesser visuals of simple RT?
No, you want the full-fat all-in max-setting path-tracing, and the +1$K GPU that must come along with it.
Here is a pic from NV blog about path tracing.
Someone please meme this better than me.
You just can`t have enough reflation in a game I guess...
Go figure!
At the same time, as I have said numerous times, RT for consumers is still in its infancy. And in a pretty bad place even. We haven't seen a single title built specifically for RT, everything is hybrid raster+RT. We simply cannot judge the merit of RT anymore than we can judge the merit of EVs simply looking at hybrids.
That said, since RT is in its infancy, of course you have to pay the early adopter tax if you want to check it out. It may be worth it to you or it may not.
(As a side note, RT isn't all about reflections. Global illumination is where it makes an even bigger difference. But global illumination doesn't screenshot too well. Though imagine how cool it would be to hide at the top of a stairway, see the enemy incoming in a reflection on a piece of glass and casually throw a grenade or two their way.)
it sounds like they treated/are treating it like regular old rasterization - where certain effects can take any amount of passes to render out the final thing, instead of doing all the necessary operations for each individual pixel in a single pass
this is seriously disappointing, if that's the case then the current HW RT implementation is dogshit and will probably see a complete overhaul in the next several years to be less poop
Also, here's a short summary: history-computer.com/ray-tracing-vs-path-tracing-whats-the-difference/
"For the new Metro, the standard rasterised versions of each map - including all individually, artist-placed lights - are gone. The tricks, fake light sources and other legacy elements are replaced with a proper, real-time RT solution that 'just works'."
does that mean no raster at all?
"By removing these, we were finally able to eliminate one other encumbrance present in more traditional forms of rendering: no longer does any part of our lighting system consist of “baked”, pre-generated data. It can now all be generated in real time."
The only (I might not have seen enough to judge) great path-traced titles I found well-done is really Minecraft. No shiny reflecting craziness but a natural touch of how light bounces off surfaces.
I've played the game twice already and it has a really good story, characters, atmosphere, etc.
I really don't understand all the complains and bickering.