The discharge date for Cyberpunk 2077 RT Overdrive Mode was revealed as eleventh April earlier this month on the Recreation Developer’s Convention. Nvidia and CD Projekt Purple expounded on how the arrival of the GeForce RTX 40 collection GPUs made it attainable to undertake this rendering know-how.
This led to speculations on if solely the most recent, extra {powerful} 40 collection GPUs would be capable to run Cyberpunk 2077 with the Patch Tracing replace, particularly since RTX 4090 launched final 12 months.
We now have some readability on the identical from the horse’s mouth, as NVIDIA’s International Artwork Director, Jakub Knapik, shed some gentle on the matter. Right here’s all the pieces it’s good to know.
What’s Path Tracing and why does it want high-end GPUs?
Path Tracing or what Nvidia calls its Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode, is mainly “full ray tracing” primarily based on RTX Direct Illumination. Versus Ray Tracing alone that renders out particular person parts of the body, Path Tracing does it unexpectedly, by rendering the picture’s oblique path. Consequently, the method turns into extremely GPU intensive, making it the go-to in solely offline rendering for merchandise like movies.
Nvidia defined on the GDC that path tracing in real-time, like for video video games, has thus been inconceivable, “till the arrival of GeForce RTX GPUs with RT Cores, and the AI-powered acceleration of NVIDIA DLSS”. So, does it imply you want super-powerful GPUs to have the ability to run video video games with path tracing?
What do you run Cyberpunk 2077 with Path Tracing on?
To cite Nvidia’s Jakub Knapik, “Sure! You wish to have very high-end {hardware} to run that (Cyberpunk 2077 Path Tracing)”.
Nonetheless, NVIDIA’s Senior Developer Know-how Engineer, Pawk Kozlowski has stated that they’re concentrating on your complete RTX 40 collection for a satisfying expertise by way of the Overdrive Mode. So that you don’t particularly require the RTX 4090 to raised get pleasure from Cyberpunk’s Night time Metropolis, an RTX 4070 may even do justice. As it’s, Nvidia additionally launched DLSS 3 final 12 months for the RTX 40 collection GPUs final 12 months, which enhances Path Tracing or the Overdrive Mode.
As for Cyberpunk 2077, Path Tracing and DLSS 3 can be accessible with a brand new replace on April eleventh. Useless to say, the sport can also be getting its first DLC later this 12 months with Phantom Liberty.
