Three months after Cyberpunk 2077 was released, real-time ray tracing is finally available on AMD RDNA 2 graphics cards. Initially released with support for Nvidia graphics cards only, the game's upcoming patch 1.2 will also enable real-time ray tracing on AMD graphics cards.

This means that you will soon have the chance to give AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT a shot. Cyberpunk 2077 has always been a very demanding game, and with ray tracing enabled, it will bring you to your knees even if you don't have the most powerful card. It can be done.

One potential solution to in-game performance degradation (once everything is maxed out), at least on Nvidia GPUs, is DLSS upscaling. DLSS, which reduces silicon load at high resolutions, has been the key to achieving smooth in-game frame rates on low-end GPUs and enabling ray tracing on today's best graphics cards like the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090. [However, the Red Team's ray-tracing silicon, known as Ray Accelerators, has proven not to be as useful for ray tracing as Nvidia's RT cores.

The lack of a DLSS replacement as of yet will put the Red Team at an even greater disadvantage for ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077; AMD has promised a DLSS analog for its FidelityFX suite of GPU features, but when it will appear and which games it will support are which games it will support, and no firm date is known. [However, Cyberpunk does support FidelityFX CAS, which integrates sharpening capabilities into dynamic rendering resolutions for more stable frame rates.

AMD's ray tracing performance will no doubt be high on the list of things to try in-game when the "coming soon" patch is released, according to the official patch notes released today.

However, the lack of AMD-compatible ray-tracing silicon may have something to do with the fact that until November, when the Radeon RX 6800 XT and Radeon RX 6800 were released, there was no AMD-compatible ray-tracing silicon available.