Released in 2007, "Crysis" quickly became the standard by which all PC gaming hardware was measured, routinely bringing the fastest graphics cards to their knees. But the only measure that mattered was "does it run Crysis?" Sort of.

Now, a new GPU crusher has replaced Crysis. It's Cyberpunk 2077's RT Overdrive mode (opens in new tab).

In Nvidia's recent demo video released on April 11, a new pathtracing mod for Cyberpunk aggressively annihilates the powerful RTX 4090 (opens in new tab) graphics card, running at 4K native resolution and set to full re-heat The eye candy of path tracing, the 4090 tanks down to 16 frames per second.

Ouch. For example, on an old RTX 2060 (opens in new tab), or maybe worse, something on the low end that supports relatively weedy hardware ray tracing, based on AMD's old RDNA 2 graphics architecture (opens in new tab) Imagine running this at low single-digit frame rates, anyone?

You may wonder why Nvidia would want to show their top-of-the-line graphics card taking such a brutal beating, but 16fps is not everything; Nvidia is also showing an RTX running the new RT Overdrive mode with DLSS enabled 4090 is also introduced.

And the frame rate jumped to about 130 fps. Kelching! Nvidia did not go into much detail. So it is unclear what the DLSS quality settings are, but we assume that frame generation must be mixed.

At any rate, it is a tremendous leap in performance. That said, our own Andy Chalk doesn't think the new path tracing mode necessarily looks better (opens in new tab). The haloing and blooming of bright objects is quite heavy, suggesting that some aspects of the rendering are cranked right up to achieve visual impact because of that.

More broadly, if you are wondering what path tracing is, it is essentially a more complete and accurate version of ray tracing. Think more rays, more reflections, more realism, more everything; Minecraft RTX is path traced.

Well, except for frames per second. As this demo video shows, with path tracing, the number of frames per second is much lower.

Whatever the case, it is perhaps not surprising that the benefits of path tracing are debatable. Raytracing itself has always had mixed results, and it is difficult to justify its benefits while often taking a significant hit on performance. [But given that the graphics in "Crysis," while a great-looking game, did not seem to live up to the abysmal frame rate, perhaps that is in some ways justified. In any case, it will be interesting to see how long it takes before a GPU can knock out Cyberpunk 2077's RT Overdrive mode at native 4K and average 60+ fps.

Theoretically, that would require four times the performance of the RTX 4090; something to think about with Nvidia's next generation RTX 50 series GPUs (probably codenamed Blackwell).