NVIDIA Previews Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode in Cyberpunk 2077, Update Arriving April 11

[T0@st]

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. On April 11th, a new Cyberpunk 2077 update will 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.



Rasterization based lighting pipelines rely on many independent subsystems. It's not uncommon that they can create unbalanced lighting in more complex scenarios. Ray tracing significantly improved overall quality and some of the main pain points of each subsystem. The unified fully ray-traced pipeline builds on these advances and completely removes the need for extensive per-scene tweaking, delivering amazing and predictable results each time, while also improving image quality, immersion, and realism.

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.

"Here at CD PROJEKT RED we are very proud to be technology innovators, and DLSS 3 gives us meaningful performance gains to tackle the addition of even higher levels of ray tracing to deliver a visually rich experience for our gamers." - Jakub Knapik, VP, Global Art Director, CD PROJEKT RED

Full ray tracing is extremely GPU intensive. For the technology preview of Cyberpunk 2077's Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode we recommend using a GeForce RTX 40 Series GPU and NVIDIA DLSS 3. The technology preview of Cyberpunk 2077's Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode will be coming on April 11th to all PC store fronts, giving GeForce RTX 40 Series gamers the ultimate Cyberpunk 2077 experience.

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.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site | Source

 

[evernessince]

Definitely getting uncanny valley vibes from those screenshots, in that they look good but are unsettling and feel off.

 

[john_]

In some cases in the demo enabling RayTracing is like enabling myopia. In general, a heavy use of shiny, reflective surfaces makes a shiny reflective world where dust does not exist, meaning less realistic.
It will take a few years before Reaytracing becomes more of a realism parameter and less of a graphics demo parameter that it is today.
Still a HUGE marketing ace in Nvidia's hands.

 

[HeadRusch1]

Definitely getting uncanny valley vibes from those screenshots, in that they look good but are unsettling and feel off.

Its the reflections....RT lighting and shadowing is what makes a scene start to look uncanny valley but reflections are where a lot of it falls apart as things are simply *too reflective* given the context of a scene. Example, those burning cars and reflective marble floors from Battlefield V.....bombed out European streets in the 1940's, debris and rubble everywhere....yet the marble floors in some buildings are eternally clean and polished, that bombed-out car in the streets reflecting flames as if it was just back from a detailer after 30 layers of clear coat were applied to it. Puddles that reflect like mirrors......but never deform and always reflect perfectly......stuff like that kills it for me.

 

[ZoneDymo]

Definitely getting uncanny valley vibes from those screenshots, in that they look good but are unsettling and feel off.

I really cant see how, it does not remotely look realistic, its like if WoW had full pathtracing, sure the light would act realistically but the game still does not look remotely like real life.

More on the game, how about they add some more car variety? extra guns and upgrades? proper deformation and physics in general? AI that does not just walk in circles.....cops that actually work?
I mean all this graphics stuff is fun for a tech demo.....but come on.

 

[JimmyDoogs]

Ray tracing looks sooo fraking good to me. Keep it coming RTX gods.

 

[oxrufiioxo]

Can't wait to give this a spin on my 4090.

 

[evernessince]

I really cant see how, it does not remotely look realistic, its like if WoW had full pathtracing, sure the light would act realistically but the game still does not look remotely like real life.

More on the game, how about they add some more car variety? extra guns and upgrades? proper deformation and physics in general? AI that does not just walk in circles.....cops that actually work?
I mean all this graphics stuff is fun for a tech demo.....but come on.

Oh I'm not saying it looks realistic, just that it's both pleasing to my eyes while also being unsettling for the reasons HeadRusch1 pointed out. I could not play any game with RT like this as even just the pictures are unsettling for me to look at.

I'd vastly prefer all the features you mention above before RT, better AI in particular.

 

[samum]

Can't wait to give this a spin on my 4090.

You'll get 6 FPS. Turn on DLSS 3 fake frame generation for 200% more performance!

 

[oxrufiioxo]

You'll get 6 FPS. Turn on DLSS 3 fake frame generation for 200% more performance!

I actually really like Frame generation in this game it's really good

But let's be real it will probably be at least 15fps
and I'm ok with that I'm tired of developers not pushing PC visuals forward I can't remember the last game I looked at and went wow I haven't seen something that looks that good.
Even witcher next gen looks better overall maxed out than the majority of new games to me and the bones of that game are like 8 years old.

I don't give two $h!ts if the average pc gamer with their potato pc can't run it.

 

[JimmyDoogs]

You'll get 6 FPS. Turn on DLSS 3 fake frame generation for 200% more performance!

Frame Generation is amazing.

 

[oxrufiioxo]

Frame Generation is amazing.

I still only like it in 2 out of the 7 games I've tried it in but it does have a ton of promise for a 1st generation technology. I originally thought I would hate it and that it would be similar to what television do but I was pretty wrong.

 

[ZoneDymo]

I actually really like Frame generation in this game it's really good

But let's be real it will probably be at least 15fps
and I'm ok with that I'm tired of developers not pushing PC visuals forward I can't remember the last game I looked at and went wow I haven't seen something that looks that good.
Even witcher next gen looks better overall maxed out than the majority of new games to me and the bones of that game are like 8 years old.

I don't give two $h!ts if the average pc gamer with their potato pc can't run it.

Last comment is a bit off imo, but for the rest yeah, by far most games just look like....well games, and Cyberpunk to me is one of them, I never found that looking spectacular in any way, but that has a lot to do with how its lacking in many areas, like physics and destruction.

Horizon is one of those few games of the last....4 - 5 years that actually looks like a new standard, plague tale at times as well.

 

[oxrufiioxo]

Last comment is a bit off imo, but for the rest yeah, by far most games just look like....well games, and Cyberpunk to me is one of them, I never found that looking spectacular in any way, but that has a lot to do with how its lacking in many areas, like physics and destruction.

Horizon is one of those few games of the last....4 - 5 years that actually looks like a new standard, plague tale at times as well.

I would Say Horizon Forbidden west on console and Plague tale on PC for sure two of the best looking games..... The character models in PT bug me or else I would hold it in higher regard.


The potato thing I was exaggerating a bit but I do get semi annoyed by the what's the point no one can run it crowd because the majority of people who are on steam have a 1060 or 3060 or whatever.

I love budget builds btw just as much as my 4090

This was built for like 800 bucks and was a more than fun system back in 2020 for example and literally cost less than any one of my previous 3 gpus. It was meant just to test the 5700XT that countless people seemed to be having issues with but I couldn't replicate them.

I scored 9 012 in Time Spy

AMD Ryzen 5 2600, AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT x 1, 16384 MB, 64-bit Windows 10}

www.3dmark.com

 

[lemonadesoda]

In some of those scenes, with RTX ON it actually looks worse, and I’d rather play it RTX OFF
It’s overdone. Not a fault of RT, but a fault of the object textures, reflections, light bloom. Dial it down!

DLSS is amazing. I saw no loss of quality but big speed ups

 

[Garrus]

I actually really like Frame generation in this game it's really good

But let's be real it will probably be at least 15fps
and I'm ok with that I'm tired of developers not pushing PC visuals forward I can't remember the last game I looked at and went wow I haven't seen something that looks that good.
Even witcher next gen looks better overall maxed out than the majority of new games to me and the bones of that game are like 8 years old.

I don't give two $h!ts if the average pc gamer with their potato pc can't run it.

ART matters the most. Now that Unreal Engine 3 is turned up to maximum with HDR in the Mass Effect Legendary Edition (I play it maxed out 120hz with OLED), it looks more beautiful than Cyberpunk to me. Cyberpunk is ugly.

I'm looking forward to seeing Witcher 4-6 with Unreal, and the CDPR team having better art direction.

In some of those scenes, with RTX ON it actually looks worse, and I’d rather play it RTX OFF
It’s overdone. Not a fault of RT, but a fault of the object textures, reflections, light bloom. Dial it down!

DLSS is amazing. I saw no loss of quality but big speed ups

DLSS looks amazing, but misses the entire point of a higher frame rate, which is improved control responsiveness. If I'm playing with a mouse and want a 90fps minimum frame rate, stable, that means I need 180fps with DLSS3 on to be equivalent.

I'm playing a game, not watching a movie.

I would Say Horizon Forbidden west on console and Plague tale on PC for sure two of the best looking games..... The character models in PT bug me or else I would hold it in higher regard.


The potato thing I was exaggerating a bit but I do get semi annoyed by the what's the point no one can run it crowd because the majority of people who are on steam have a 1060 or 3060 or whatever.

I love budget builds btw just as much as my 4090

This was built for like 800 bucks and was a more than fun system back in 2020 for example and literally cost less than any one of my previous 3 gpus. It was meant just to test the 5700XT that countless people seemed to be having issues with but I couldn't replicate them.

I scored 9 012 in Time Spy

AMD Ryzen 5 2600, AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT x 1, 16384 MB, 64-bit Windows 10}

www.3dmark.com

Totally agree. Plague Tale2 and Horizon2, along with Mass Effect LE are the 3 best looking next gen games so far. The only other PS5 game I've played that impressed me with visuals was Octopath 2, so I'd go with those 4 games if you want a treat on PS5.

 

[ixi]

I really cant see how, it does not remotely look realistic, its like if WoW had full pathtracing, sure the light would act realistically but the game still does not look remotely like real life.

More on the game, how about they add some more car variety? extra guns and upgrades? proper deformation and physics in general? AI that does not just walk in circles.....cops that actually work?
I mean all this graphics stuff is fun for a tech demo.....but come on.

Why would they the Hard thing... Game is dead and linear...

 

[oxrufiioxo]

ART matters the most. Now that Unreal Engine 3 is turned up to maximum with HDR in the Mass Effect Legendary Edition (I play it maxed out 120hz with OLED), it looks more beautiful than Cyberpunk to me. Cyberpunk is ugly.

I'm looking forward to seeing Witcher 4-6 with Unreal, and the CDPR team having better art direction.



DLSS looks amazing, but misses the entire point of a higher frame rate, which is improved control responsiveness. If I'm playing with a mouse and want a 90fps minimum frame rate, stable, that means I need 180fps with DLSS3 on to be equivalent.

I'm playing a game, not watching a movie.



Totally agree. Plague Tale2 and Horizon2, along with Mass Effect LE are the 3 best looking next gen games so far. The only other PS5 game I've played that impressed me with visuals was Octopath 2, so I'd go with those 4 games if you want a treat on PS5.

Not a huge fan of UE never have been.... The coalition is the only developer that has impressed me with the engine. Gears 4/5 and the matrix awakens demo.

 

[Why_Me]

16 FPS. That's horrible.

RTX 4090 Gets Just 16 FPS in Cyberpunk 2077 RT Overdrive Preview

Upscaling or DLSS 3 Frame Generation are practically mandatory

www.tomshardware.com

 

[oxrufiioxo]

16 FPS. That's horrible.

RTX 4090 Gets Just 16 FPS in Cyberpunk 2077 RT Overdrive Preview

Upscaling or DLSS 3 Frame Generation are practically mandatory

www.tomshardware.com

Seems like 100-120fps with DLSS/Frame generation so it'll be more than playable.

 

[wolf]

RT Overdrive mode is a brand-new rendering mode being added to Cyberpunk 2077 on April 11th.(opens in new tab) The new graphics mode replaces the game's current ray-tracing pipeline with a fully unified path-tracing solution that significantly expands the game's rendering engine. There's no hybrid rendering, only ray traced pixels. Nvidia has previously demonstrated this mode, and it notes that on average it needs 635 ray calculations per pixel — compared to just 39 rays per pixel with Battlefield V, one of the original launch games for RTX ray tracing.

Makes sense how slow anything would run it, given Portal RTX and Quake RTX being fully path traced and perhaps several orders of magnitude easier to run the base game. Considering what is happening here, it's not all that surprising that upscaling/FG are needed to get it to high framerates, a current gen AAA title completely path traced, a taste of what's to come.

 

[Guwapo77]

The video is nothing short of breathtaking and I really hope they keep pushing forward in the graphic department. Like Oxrufiioxo stated above, I want to be wow'd. I won't say I was it was 8 years ago for me, but I loved the look of Elden Ring. I can only imagine the visuals path tracing would bring to such a title. I viewed this on an IPS panel...on an OLED tho? Man.

​

 

[crubino]

nah, it's very smooth @1080p!!

 

[Vayra86]

In some cases in the demo enabling RayTracing is like enabling myopia. In general, a heavy use of shiny, reflective surfaces makes a shiny reflective world where dust does not exist, meaning less realistic.
It will take a few years before Reaytracing becomes more of a realism parameter and less of a graphics demo parameter that it is today.
Still a HUGE marketing ace in Nvidia's hands.

Yeah I don't know, I strongly prefer the RTX OFF shots in the video to the ON comparison of them, like, every single one.

 

[mama]

Unless you're on a 4090 what's the point? Even then: 16fps? Frame generation is not the solution as it degrades quality. Surely raytracing is about better quality imaging. I guess this is an upsell for future high end RTX GPUs. Looks like Nvidia doesn't see a certain alternative raytracing tech coming...