Cyberpunk 2077 has lastly obtained its long-awaited Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode replace with Patch 1.62. The patch provides a brand new graphics choice to the sport (Overdrive Mode) that brings full-blown path-traced lighting, changing all rasterized lighting with real-time lighting simulation. The consequences are phenomenal, however the efficiency hit is intense. In consequence, CD Projeck Pink requires an RTX 3090/3090 TI (for 1080P 30FPS) or RTX 4070 Ti or quicker to run Overdrive Mode.
Take a look at our earlier protection right here for a full rundown of the sport’s path-tracing lighting results. However to sum up, Overdrive Mode replaces almost all gentle sources with path-traced 3D simulated gentle, considerably growing Cyberpunk 2077’s picture high quality. Earlier/lower-end ray-tracing modes used a hybridized strategy of using RT results sparingly to maintain efficiency excessive. With Overdrive Mode, the sport transitions to a totally unified ray-tracing pipeline designed for path-tracing from the bottom up.
Earlier than you get confused, NVIDIA and CD Projeckt Pink use the phrases ray-tracing and path-tracing interchangeably in Cyberpunk 2077’s Overdrive advertising. (opens in new tab) Nonetheless, the mode revolves round path tracing nearly fully — simply to set the document straight. Path tracing is a extra performant technique of simulating 3D gentle and produces almost equivalent outcomes to ray tracing.
In observe, Overdrive makes an evening and day distinction to the sport’s environment, particularly in darkly lit and shadowy areas. The place rasterized lighting strategies struggled to provide life like ambient lighting, resulting in gentle leakage, incorrectly shadowed objects, and extra. Overdrive’s full path-tracing graphics pipeline fixes all these points.
Efficiency
CD Projekt Pink was not kidding about Overdrive Mode’s graphics necessities. The sport is successfully Portal RTX on steroids for the reason that GPU has to render full-blown path-traced lighting results in an open-world atmosphere.
In response to preliminary efficiency outcomes by Digital Foundry, Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4090 runs the sport at simply 18 FPS at 4K decision with Overdrive Mode engaged. To attain 60FPS, DLSS 2 efficiency mode was required with out body era. Nonetheless, with DLSS 3 body gen enabled, the RTX 4090 achieves almost 100FPS.
The RTX 4090 seems to truthful considerably higher natively at 1440P and 1080P. Daniel Owen examined each of those resolutions with Overdrive Mode and located the RTX 4090 might obtain roughly 45FPS at 1440P and over 60FPS at 1080 natively.
Sadly, many of the preliminary efficiency protection largely covers the RTX 4090 solely. However we discovered one efficiency overview from somebody operating an RTX 4070 Ti. Unsurprisingly the GPU festivals considerably worse than the RTX 4090 with Overdrive Mode, averaging lower than 25 FPS at native 1440P with body era enabled. To hit 60+ FPS, DLSS high quality and body era was required. Nonetheless, take his outcomes with a grain of salt since we won’t confirm the validity of his take a look at setup.
Once more, Cyberpunk 2077’s Ray-Tracing: Overdrive Mode is accessible solely to RTX 3090 sequence GPUs and RTX 4070 Ti or quicker GPUs. Nonetheless, Overdrive Mode is accessible within the sport’s photograph mode when you have an 8GB graphics card or higher. The patch is accessible now for all Cyberpunk 2077 homeowners.