At GDC, CD Projekt Red is showing off the future of ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077, one bouncing neon light at a time. This comes along with a new graphics preset, Raytracing: Overdrive Mode (opens in new tab), coming to the PC version of Cyberpunk 2077 on April 11. This gives you plenty of time to explore the RTX 4080 (opens in new tab) and its powerful frame generation magic. You will surely need it.

The Overdrive mode, which Nvidia calls a "technology preview," features path tracing, aka full ray tracing (opens in new tab), which was announced last year and "accurately simulates light throughout the scene." Light sources now project "physically correct soft shadows," and colored lights bounce multiple times in a scene. More realistic direct and indirect lighting is created for games filled with neon, such as cyberpunk. In this video (opens in new tab), you can see exactly what Nvidia is talking about, with various light sources bouncing off of multiple surfaces, such as water and metal, in a more real life-like manner. according to Nvidia, improved physics-based lighting could strain the GPU should eliminate the need for other occlusion technologies that could strain the GPU.

Path tracing has been around for some time and is often used by TV and film VFX artists. Path tracing is quite demanding on the GPU and would be a considerable burden to incorporate into games; Nvidia claims that RTX 40 series GPUs can withstand this challenge, but to make it tolerable, upscaling and frame generation technologies such as DLSS 3 will need help. technology will need help.

With DLSS 3, you should get a nice performance boost when all the bells and whistles are turned on. This technology allows the game to render only a fraction of the pixels and the AI makes up the rest. We'll see how well "Cyberpunk 2077" performs in overdrive mode when we test it out and run the numbers next month.

Meanwhile, while we wait for April 11, Nvidia has released a game-ready driver for a technology preview of Cyberpunk 2077's ray tracing: overdrive mode, which you can download now if you have the right hardware (opens in new tab ). Starting today, developers can develop games using the Nvidia RTX Path Tracing SDK kit (opens in new tab).