Update: Nvidia has contacted us and informed us that the original release notes regarding RT Overdrive mode were misleading. In fact, the new path tracing feature works on GPUs with hardware ray tracing capabilities, including Nvidia's original RTX 20 series and AMD's RX 6000 and 7000 graphics.

As explained below, don't get too excited if you have older RT-capable hardware, given that the RTX 4090 drags down to just 16 fps when running the new eye candy natively without DLSS goodies. The frame rate will almost certainly not be pretty.

Original article. Cyberpunk 2077's RT overdrive mode gets the glory of path tracing. Well, if you have a recent Nvidia graphics card, rejoice. Those with older Nvidia GPUs or AMD graphics should not rejoice.

Path tracing is, of course, essentially full ray tracing, including more rays, more reflections, and everything that makes lighting realistic.

According to cyberpunk creators CD Projekt RED, this patch "pushes the limits of what is technically possible. However, since it is so new and radically different from anything we have used before, we know it will not be perfect from the start and players may experience some issues.

CD Projekt RED also describes the patch as "a vision for the future that we want to share and we are committed to the continuous work and improvement of this feature."

Nvidia's demo video shows RT Overdrive mode on RTX 4090 dropping up to 16 fps (open in new tab) Try it on RTX 2060, and you'll see the same results. Yikes. However, it cannot.

When frame generation is included in DLSS, RTX 4090 exceeds 100 fps. However, frame generation is only available on the latest RTX 40 series GPUs. Perhaps that is why the release notes state that this patch is currently only supported on RTX 40 series boards, and only RTX 3090 from RTX 30 series.

For other GPUs with at least 8GB of VRAM that support ray tracing, there is an option to render "path-traced screenshots in photo mode". This is possible because it means rendering only one frame, as opposed to the several frames per second (i.e., FPS) rendering that occurs when playing a game.

This makes sense in a way, considering that enabling this mode on cards that do not support much ray tracing will inevitably result in a slide show. However, it is also a bit disappointing.

At the very least, there could have been an option to watch it run incredibly slowly on a less suitable GPU, both for kicks and to compare frame rates and show how powerful the new GPU is.

Anyway, let's not forget about us while the lucky few download it and bask in its path-traced glory.