Tuesday, April 11th 2023
NVIDIA Shares Cyberpunk 2077 RT: Overdrive Mode Performance Numbers
CD PROJEKT RED's Cyberpunk 2077 is already one of the most technologically advanced games available, using several ray tracing techniques to render its neon-illuminated environments and vast Night City visuals at incredible levels of detail. Now, a new Cyberpunk 2077 update has hit the streets, featuring the technology preview of the Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode, which enhances the game's already-amazing visuals with full ray tracing, otherwise known as path tracing.
Full ray tracing accurately simulates light throughout an entire scene. It is used by visual effects artists to create film and TV graphics that are indistinguishable from reality, but until the arrival of GeForce RTX GPUs with RT Cores, and the AI-powered acceleration of NVIDIA DLSS, real-time video game full ray tracing was impossible because it's extremely GPU intensive. Previous techniques separately addressed ray-traced shadows, reflections and global illumination for a small number of light sources. Full ray tracing models the properties of light from a virtually unlimited number of emissive sources, delivering physically correct shadows, reflections and global illumination on all objects. The technology preview for Cyberpunk 2077's Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode is a sneak peek into the future of full ray tracing, and we are working with CD PROJEKT RED on further full ray tracing enhancements, bug fixes, and performance optimizations.
One of the most impactful additions in the technology preview of Cyberpunk 2077's Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode is NVIDIA RTX Direct Illumination (RTXDI), a free SDK that enables developers to closely replicate the appearance of light in scenes with numerous light sources. With RTXDI, thousands of objects can emit ray-traced light.
In Cyberpunk 2077, each neon sign, street lamp, LED billboard, car headlight, and other source of light is now ray-traced, bathing objects, walls, passing cars and pedestrians in accurate lighting.
With full ray tracing and RTXDI, now practically all light sources cast physically correct soft shadows, a feat previously unimaginable using previous approaches. Players will experience enhanced shadowing, with better depth, detail and realism. Cyberpunk 2077 features a full day-night cycle. To upgrade indirect lighting from all emissive sources, including the sun and moon, Global Illumination (GI) needed to be path traced, too. Rendering techniques including Screen Space Reflections, Screen Space Ambient Occlusion, and the existing GI solutions were replaced by a single unified algorithm that delivers more accurate lighting of scenes and objects. With the Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode enabled, natural colored lighting bounces multiple times throughout Cyberpunk 2077's world, creating more realistic indirect lighting and occlusion. Reflections now incorporate bounced detail, too, and are rendered at full resolution, accentuating the cyberpunk aesthetic and further heightening immersion.
Combined, the full ray tracing of direct and global illumination give gamers the most advanced real-time lighting seen to date in gaming, and a preview of how all games will look in the future.
To bring these incredible effects to life, at performant frame rates, CD PROJEKT RED and NVIDIA have worked hand in hand to introduce new optimizations for this entirely new fully ray-traced pipeline.
NVIDIA Shader Execution Reordering (SER) helps GPUs with executing incoherent workloads boosting performance, NVIDIA Real-Time Denoisers (NRD) have been leveraged to further improve performance and image quality, and our drivers have been specially tuned to optimize frame rates. So be sure to update to the Cyberpunk 2077 Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode GeForce Game Ready Driver.
Together with NVIDIA DLSS 3, the performance multiplier, these technologies, tweaks and optimizations enable GeForce RTX 40 Series gamers to play Cyberpunk 2077 fully ray-traced with maximum performance.
With DLSS 3 activated, 4K performance on a GeForce RTX 4090 will be boosted by 4.6X to 103 FPS, and on a GeForce RTX 4080, performance leaps by 5X to 74 FPS. At 1440p, GeForce RTX 4070 Ti performance increases by 3.1X using DLSS 3, to 80 FPS. On recently-released GeForce RTX 40 Series laptops, DLSS 3 multiplies performance by 3X, enabling laptop owners to experience the fully ray-traced Night City anywhere in the world.
As you can see, full ray tracing is extremely GPU intensive. For the technology preview of Cyberpunk 2077's Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode, we currently recommend a GeForce RTX 40 Series GPU and NVIDIA DLSS 3.
Those without a game-ready device can also experience Cyberpunk 2077 with DLSS 3 and full ray tracing in the new Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode by streaming it from the cloud with a GeForce NOW Ultimate membership, which gives you the power of a GeForce RTX 4080-class PC in the cloud.
For the very best experience with Cyberpunk 2077's new fully ray traced mode, download our latest Game Ready Drivers for your PC or laptop.
Source:
NVIDIA
Full ray tracing accurately simulates light throughout an entire scene. It is used by visual effects artists to create film and TV graphics that are indistinguishable from reality, but until the arrival of GeForce RTX GPUs with RT Cores, and the AI-powered acceleration of NVIDIA DLSS, real-time video game full ray tracing was impossible because it's extremely GPU intensive. Previous techniques separately addressed ray-traced shadows, reflections and global illumination for a small number of light sources. Full ray tracing models the properties of light from a virtually unlimited number of emissive sources, delivering physically correct shadows, reflections and global illumination on all objects. The technology preview for Cyberpunk 2077's Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode is a sneak peek into the future of full ray tracing, and we are working with CD PROJEKT RED on further full ray tracing enhancements, bug fixes, and performance optimizations.
In Cyberpunk 2077, each neon sign, street lamp, LED billboard, car headlight, and other source of light is now ray-traced, bathing objects, walls, passing cars and pedestrians in accurate lighting.
With full ray tracing and RTXDI, now practically all light sources cast physically correct soft shadows, a feat previously unimaginable using previous approaches. Players will experience enhanced shadowing, with better depth, detail and realism. Cyberpunk 2077 features a full day-night cycle. To upgrade indirect lighting from all emissive sources, including the sun and moon, Global Illumination (GI) needed to be path traced, too. Rendering techniques including Screen Space Reflections, Screen Space Ambient Occlusion, and the existing GI solutions were replaced by a single unified algorithm that delivers more accurate lighting of scenes and objects. With the Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode enabled, natural colored lighting bounces multiple times throughout Cyberpunk 2077's world, creating more realistic indirect lighting and occlusion. Reflections now incorporate bounced detail, too, and are rendered at full resolution, accentuating the cyberpunk aesthetic and further heightening immersion.
To bring these incredible effects to life, at performant frame rates, CD PROJEKT RED and NVIDIA have worked hand in hand to introduce new optimizations for this entirely new fully ray-traced pipeline.
NVIDIA Shader Execution Reordering (SER) helps GPUs with executing incoherent workloads boosting performance, NVIDIA Real-Time Denoisers (NRD) have been leveraged to further improve performance and image quality, and our drivers have been specially tuned to optimize frame rates. So be sure to update to the Cyberpunk 2077 Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode GeForce Game Ready Driver.
Together with NVIDIA DLSS 3, the performance multiplier, these technologies, tweaks and optimizations enable GeForce RTX 40 Series gamers to play Cyberpunk 2077 fully ray-traced with maximum performance.
With DLSS 3 activated, 4K performance on a GeForce RTX 4090 will be boosted by 4.6X to 103 FPS, and on a GeForce RTX 4080, performance leaps by 5X to 74 FPS. At 1440p, GeForce RTX 4070 Ti performance increases by 3.1X using DLSS 3, to 80 FPS. On recently-released GeForce RTX 40 Series laptops, DLSS 3 multiplies performance by 3X, enabling laptop owners to experience the fully ray-traced Night City anywhere in the world.
Those without a game-ready device can also experience Cyberpunk 2077 with DLSS 3 and full ray tracing in the new Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode by streaming it from the cloud with a GeForce NOW Ultimate membership, which gives you the power of a GeForce RTX 4080-class PC in the cloud.
For the very best experience with Cyberpunk 2077's new fully ray traced mode, download our latest Game Ready Drivers for your PC or laptop.
42 Comments on NVIDIA Shares Cyberpunk 2077 RT: Overdrive Mode Performance Numbers
That magic isn't making my 2060 laptop play this, you sold me a lie once clearly and this statement is pure biscuits, nonsense I need to Download your latest hardware, , but it's not me who's the fool.
Or did they disable the old ray tracing options with this update? No, they didn't, you overspend on a card 3 years ago and you're still screaming about it.
;)
It is pretty brutal for the tiniest bit of unnoticeable visual improvement .
Perhaps there'll be a game in the future that changes my mind? But so far RT just feels like a gimmick to me, one that you have to trade too much for.
Also at least for me, I get a lot of denoising artefact. Those are amplified by DLSS3 frame generation and the fact you have to also use a very aggressive DLSS2 settings (Performance for me at 4K with a 4080). those can be very distracting when you play.
I also saw under some condition some strange flickering where it's like every texture are resetting. Very strange. It just last few frames but it's annoying. i think i had only that in few place so it's not super common but still. Maybe it's the same issue as memory allocation but when i checked, it was at 13 GB allocated so there was still plenty of room.
I suspect it was a bug in DLSS when in some scenario, it would just lose the previous frame data and you see for few frame non-upscaled image.
to me it still a nice tech demo but don't rush buying a 40xx card for that. (unless you really want and need it). Just save that game on the side and play it in a GPU gen or two at native. At that resolution, the denoising artefact are way less problematic and the game look much better too. I find that those denoising artefact + DLSS is not an amazing combo. Unless they fix it, i think i will pass for now.
Speaking on personal experience,
I've played the original Metro Exodus on Raytracing then played the EE version.
Some of the scenes in the original version are very very very dark in nature.
Turing on Raytracing simply makes the game not fun when 90% of your screen is pure black most of the time.
Metro EE on the other hand, addressed this "problem" by adding artificial light sources back into those scenes.
Which is a really dumb solution.
And it just shows adding Raytracing to games isn't a simple "Visual enhancement" but instead,
Games don't really benefit from it if not designed around it from the very first place.
It honestly doesnt look as impressive as quake 2.
I think they need to hurry up and make the morrow wind path tracing version already... I would play that in a heartbeat.
And now there's tons of hyping you should buy RTX 4090, since it's the only Nvidia card in a lineup that makes sense and has less price increase than performance increase!
And what about VR? With high resolution nobody is even thinking about raytracing, there's not enough rasterisation performance for optimal experience even on top of the line cards!
It's in a laptop and at that time all GPU were too expensive hence I bought the laptop.
Going from 11 fps to 59 does makes everyone (I think) wonder about visual quality. I mean can we really consider those 59 fps as equal quality to those 11 fps? If not, then this isn't an apples to apples comparison.
took the companies a while before the gpu's were powerful enough where enabling them doesnt have much of a performance hit, it will be quite a while before ray tracing performance hit will be small