Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the most anticipated games in years, and thanks to the skill of CD Projekt Red's artists and developers, and the real-time ray-traced lighting effects, it looks great. I can't wait to peruse Andy's brilliant Cyberpunk 2077 preview playthrough and dip my augmented toes into the murky depths of Night City and its backwoods.

But how will it play, given that what was once a fully functional game has been repeatedly delayed since January for polish and bug fixes, one hopes it will run beautifully on whatever compatible PC will eventually be able to play it.

And if CDPR's past big game releases are any indication, they probably will be. There have been reports that recent preview builds have had to run at 1080p with DLSS turned on to support the current set of ray-traced video on the RTX 2080 Ti. But that's fine - early builds, early drivers, more optimizations are needed. That's fine.

I may still not be 100 percent convinced by the resolute first-person perspective, and some of the combat still doesn't excite me wholeheartedly, but I'm not going to bother until I actually play it.

And I'm not worried about it being a DirectX 12-only game.

Absolutely not; I've only had great experiences with DX12 performance around launch day. No weird bugs, no weird graphics artifacts, no inexplicable crashes, no recommendations to use the alternative APIs provided until AMD or Nvidia releases an appropriate patch to fix the problem with the graphics settings.

I can't wait. I'm worried. All of these things are happening with DirectX 12 games.

The fact that there is no fallback API option for those running other operating systems besides Windows 10 does not concern me, as Marcin Gollent of CDPR told PCGamesHardware.com, Windows 7 is still a popular OS and "thanks to the DX12 support in Windows 7 SP1 that Microsoft introduced last year, this game will work on this system. We have tested Cyberpunk 2077 on Windows 7 and will continue to test it to resolve edge cases.

In other words, Win7 may be compatible with Cyberpunk 2077, but Windows 8.x is not. But if you are one of the few still laboring under that failed OS, perhaps you are one of the Windows Vista apologists and don't care what you think.

But the fact that there is no DirectX 11 safety net or Vulkan API replacement makes my feelings about the Day 0 patch tingle. Who will suffer? Will it be the Nvidia faithful who expect RTX GPUs to work fine the moment the game is released, the people who sign up for the future of in-game lighting ray tracing?" given the amount of development time and cockroach-killing that Nvidia offers for its generally friendly RTX-On games. one has to hope that its ray-tracing ideals will be easily and smoothly accessible to GeForce gamers from the get-go.

Team Red That may be another issue. Perhaps it depends on how accessible AMD's driver team is to games before launch. Both GPU manufacturers have made it a top priority and are focused on ensuring that drivers are released on the first day of release for important games. And Cyberpunk 2077 is just one of them. So, hopefully, it should be an easy experience for both sides of the graphics card camp.

However, there were certainly some funny problems on the day of release for many games that implemented DirectX 12. Thankfully, there were alternative APIs that could be used instead.

However, CD Projekt Red is throwing its weight behind DX12, albeit for entirely understandable reasons.

"There are two main reasons we chose DX12," Gollent tells PCGH. "First, DX12 is a standard API for the Xbox platform, and since this game is also coming to Xbox One, we wanted to implement it as soon as possible. Second, it is the birthplace of DXR and we had plans to invest in DXR from a very early stage, so the choice to adopt DX12 was a very easy one."

The fact that CDPR is fully committed to DirectX Raytracing (DXR) on the PC is great, and by focusing purely on DX12, the struggles that the graphics API has introduced to other games may not be an issue for Cyberpunk 2077 I am hopeful that this may be the case. Certainly CDPR has a history of solid game launches, and the fact that the launch has been postponed numerous times suggests that they are not interested in releasing a game unless it is in the best shape to begin with.

Therefore, while the status of DirectX 12 only is a concern, we are confident that the announcement from CD Projekt Red should not affect the eventual release of "Cyberpunk 2077". Therefore, I would be happy if you could tell me in the comments section that there is nothing to worry about.