NVIDIA Shares Cyberpunk 2077 RT: Overdrive Mode Performance Numbers

[GFreeman]

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.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site | Source

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

"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."

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.

 

[Corvid]

"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."

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.

Are you blaming nvidia because their new GPUs perform better than your 3 year old GPU?

 

[GoldenX]

"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."

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.

While this patch is nothing more than a cool tech demo, it's not NVIDIA's fault technology marches on.

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.

 

[AusWolf]

I was expecting an old RT mode vs Overdrive mode performance comparison, yet, here we are with another advert for DLSS 3.0. Useless.

 

[mechtech]

Can’t wait to see what this looks like on my GT1030!!!

 

[cdawall]

"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."

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.

You could just buy another overpriced laptop and hope technology doesn't keep advancing. I don't know that it'll work though.

 

[Crackong]

Steve Nexus already had a video on this for the "Real word performance without fake frame generation"

It is pretty brutal for the tiniest bit of unnoticeable visual improvement .

 

[tpa-pr]

So i've recently started playing CP2077 (and love it by the way, what an amazing game) and decided to turn on ray tracing as an experiment. I was hoping that the implementation in this game would be the one that convinces me of why ray tracing is "good" (since my only other experience was with Elden Ring and that certainly didn't). Unfortunately it didn't impress me enough to sacrifice the native rendering in favour of upscaling required to get a decent framerate. It could be my age and gaming experience but the pre-baked lighting, reflections and shadows already looks incredible to me.

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.

 

[AusWolf]

So i've recently started playing CP2077 (and love it by the way, what an amazing game) and decided to turn on ray tracing as an experiment. I was hoping that the implementation in this game would be the one that convinces me of why ray tracing is "good" (since my only other experience was with Elden Ring and that certainly didn't). Unfortunately it didn't impress me enough to sacrifice the native rendering in favour of upscaling required to get a decent framerate. It could be my age and gaming experience but the pre-baked lighting, reflections and shadows already looks incredible to me.

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.

I couldn't agree more! Besides, one should be playing the game, not looking at pretty shadows. Sure, graphics are important, but not at the cost of everything else.

 

[Minus Infinity]

Ok as a tech demo it's very nice, but's ludicrous to think this will run at playable frames rates on 4090 even with fake frames except at low res. Maybe Blackwell 5090 could vaslty improve things, but that will be well over $2K mark my words. 3nm is 50% dearer than 4nm, so if you think Lovelace pricing sucks (and it does) this is the prep for Blackwell's sticker shock.

 

[Punkenjoy]

I think the game could look much better if the assets works was made with path tracing in mind. When I play, I find that the assets look sometime odds. It's also very depended on where you are in the game. Some area inside with colored lighting are way more interesting. During the day, most area outside don't benefits much (i think better textures or material could make thing look better there).

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.

 

[Scircura]

So i've recently started playing CP2077 (and love it by the way, what an amazing game) and decided to turn on ray tracing as an experiment. I was hoping that the implementation in this game would be the one that convinces me of why ray tracing is "good" (since my only other experience was with Elden Ring and that certainly didn't). Unfortunately it didn't impress me enough to sacrifice the native rendering in favour of upscaling required to get a decent framerate. It could be my age and gaming experience but the pre-baked lighting, reflections and shadows already looks incredible to me.

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.

I think Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition is a great example of a game that benefits visually from ray tracing but still runs well. Give it a try.

 

[Crackong]

I think Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition is a great example of a game that benefits visually from ray tracing but still runs well. Give it a try.

Metro Exodus is another game which is "Ray tracing makes it realistic but not fun".
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.

 

[phanbuey]

Just don't look at any chain link fences.


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.

 

[Hyderz]

visually looks nice

 

[matar]

I am a big Nvidia fan BUT what bothers me is DLSS 3 NOT on 3000 Series i don't play cyberpunk tired it did not like it but to push us to buy 4000 GPUs for Dlss 3 is very bad GTX 1000 does not have RT cores and they added RTX support latter on but no dlss i understand no hardware to support it , but RTX 2000 and 3000 have the hardware to support it shame on you Nvidia you are a money grabber.

 

[Bwaze]

Remember when RTX 3090 was announced, and Jensen told the RTX 3080 is a true flagship for $699, and cards above that are a Titan class semi-proffesional accelerators?

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!

 

[AusWolf]

Ok as a tech demo it's very nice, but's ludicrous to think this will run at playable frames rates on 4090 even with fake frames except at low res. Maybe Blackwell 5090 could vaslty improve things, but that will be well over $2K mark my words. 3nm is 50% dearer than 4nm, so if you think Lovelace pricing sucks (and it does) this is the prep for Blackwell's sticker shock.

In my opinion, rasterization is at a point when it runs well on basically anything, so AMD and Nvidia should devote all extra die space for more/better RT hardware on future generations, and leave traditional raster cores alone, or just improve on their architecture. What I find strange is that Nvidia and fans have been chanting the mantra of "RT is the future" ever since Turing, yet the ratio of raster/RT hardware is exactly the same on Ampere and Ada. We're brute forcing our way into a bazillion FPS gaming with traditional rasterization on 300+ Watt cards, but we still have to rely on magic fake frames with RT, which sucks.

 

[Bwaze]

In my opinion, rasterization is at a point when it runs well on basically anything...

There's now couple of games that don't do well even with only rasterisation, without raytracing. You can call them bad unoptimized ports, but the fact is they are popular.

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!

 

[fevgatos]

In my opinion, rasterization is at a point when it runs well on basically anything, so AMD and Nvidia should devote all extra die space for more/better RT hardware on future generations, and leave traditional raster cores alone, or just improve on their architecture. What I find strange is that Nvidia and fans have been chanting the mantra of "RT is the future" ever since Turing, yet the ratio of raster/RT hardware is exactly the same on Ampere and Ada. We're brute forcing our way into a bazillion FPS gaming with traditional rasterization on 300+ Watt cards, but we still have to rely on magic fake frames with RT, which sucks.

Ι totally agree that rasterization performance is already off the charts, but I completely disagree on the whole fake frames and dlss bad notion. It's just not true. They both work and look great.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

Are you blaming nvidia because their new GPUs perform better than your 3 year old GPU?

In saying they gave shit support to the hyped tech they sold me yes, f#@# em...

It's in a laptop and at that time all GPU were too expensive hence I bought the laptop.

 

[HOkay]

I'm very interested to give this a try, but it does seem pretty academic atm if we're talking 22fps worth of latency, regardless of the visual smoothness of 100fps. Although presumably DLSS 2 must bring that up to close to 50fps before the DLSS 3 FG doubles it to get to the 100fps. Playable or not though, I just wanna see if this actually looks any better to see whether to be hyped about a fully path traced future or not.

 

[john_]

I see those numbers and just comes to my mind those ratings from TV makers. Like Samsung's PQI.
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.

 

[fevgatos]

I see those numbers and just comes to my mind those ratings from TV makers. Like Samsung's PQI.
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.

Can you tell the difference between native and dlss q in a blind test? Say I post 5 pictures and you tell me which is which? Everybody I tried it with spectacularly failed, in which case, yeah, they are equal quality. In fact I'd say in some games dlss looks better than native, especially those problematic taa implementations (cod comes to mind)