CDPR and Nvidia To Present “RTX Path Tracing” For Cyberpunk 2077 At GDC 2023

It seems as though Nvidia and CD Projekt RED will finally offer us a glimpse of better Ray Tracing support in Cyberpunk 2077.

A visual breakthrough after the first announcement of Overdrive Mode and DLSS 3 for Cyberpunk 2077 in September 2022. There will be an RTX Path Tracing demo on March 22 from 10:30 to 11:00 A.M. PST at GDC 2023.

Currently, AMD and Intel support ray tracing, but NVIDIA is already looking ahead to push Path Tracing support with RTX 40-series graphics cards. This technology will be accessible with the new game option “RT: Overdrive” for Cyberpunk 2077.

RTX Direct Illumination, a ray Tracing capability that Nvidia has been testing for over two years, was previously announced by Nvidia and CDPR as included in RT Overdrive Mode.

Millions of direct lights can be added using RTXDI to a gaming scenario, although how it is implemented would vary depending on the developer’s needs.

Overdrive Mode would theoretically be composed of the following effects:

• NVIDIA RTX Direct Illumination (RTXDI): Gives every neon sign, street lamp, car headlight, LED billboard, and TV proper lighting and shadows with ray tracing, bathroom objects, walls, passing cars, and pedestrians with proper color lighting.
• Indirect illumination with ray tracing and reflections now bounces several times compared to the single bounce of the previous solution. The result is even more precise, realistic, and immersive global lighting, reflections, and self-reflection.
• Ray-traced reflections are now rendered at full resolution, further improving their quality.
• Improved, more physics-based lighting eliminates the need for any other occlusion technique.

However, both companies announced that Cyberpunk 2077, like Quake II RTX and Portal RTX, will add Path Tracing, making the Polish developer’s open-world action RPG the first current AAA title to use this rendering technique.

RT: Overdrive will be more demanding than regular ray tracing techniques, and it remains to be seen if a GeForce RTX 4090 can reach 60FPS in 4K with DLSS 3 in Quality Mode since, without Path Tracing, it gets 100 FPS, but with this activated it would be another story.

Are you excited about RTX Path Tracing coming to Cyberpunk 2077? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.