Nvidia and CDPR are dialing Cyberpunk’s ray tracing up to eleven in a free update coming next week.
Cyberpunk 2077 is getting full-path ray tracing in a free update coming to PC next week. Yes, I know, Cyberpunk already has ray tracing, but the ray tracing Cyberpunk received in its current-gen update is just partial ray tracing. The full-on ray tracing experience arrives on April 11, but you’ll need an extremely hefty gaming rig to even think about enabling it.
In the current version of Cyberpunk 2077, you can enable “ray-traced shadows, reflections, and global illumination for a small number of light sources,” which still looks pretty good. The update coming next week will enable ray tracing for all light sources, “delivering physically correct shadows, reflections, and global illumination on all objects.”
What does that mean? Take a look at the video below and find out. You can see the massive difference in the way each scene is lit, with certain light sources creating powerful shadows that drown out smaller light sources. Parts of each scene become harder to see as the light becomes blindingly bright or reflects off of mirrored surfaces. Neon lights make entire storefronts glow while bright coronas surround every streetlamp.
Ray tracing is impressive, but not nearly as impressive as the frames gained when DLSS 3 is enabled. Cyberpunk 2077 got DLSS 3 support earlier in January, which is a good thing since it seems to be the only way to get more than 30 fps at 4K even with an RTX 4090 powering the visuals. DLSS 3 isn’t just a small jump either–framerates leap from 30 to over 100 fps with Nvidia’s AI-powered super sampling technology enabled.
We should point out that the only way to get these visuals is with a PC and a 40-series RTX video card, not to mention equally beefy computer hardware backing it up. Even current-gen consoles won’t be able to make Cyberpunk 2077 look this good.
Cyberpunk 2077’s Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode, as CD Projekt Red calls it, is coming April 11. We might see a full-on Cyberpunk 2077 update at the same time, but the DLSS 3 update came in January without anything else attached, so we might not see update 1.62 with the ray tracing update coming next Tuesday.
