Cyberpunk 2077 RT Overdrive was announced recently, which enhances the visuals of the game with new RT effects, Direct Illumination, Ray-traced indirect lighting, reflections, etc. CDPR is now taking things to another level with Cyberpunk 2077 RT Overdrive Path Tracing. Nvidia will showcase the new feature at GDC 2023 on March 22.
Cyberpunk 2077 RT Overdrive with RTX Path Tracing aims to minimize constraints put on the content creators by delivering pixel-perfect soft shadows and indirect light contribution in fully dynamic environments from all the lights – be it an analytical local light, emissive surface, skylight.
The GDC 2023 session viewer mentions:
Attendee is presented with the current Cyberpunk 2077 rendering pipeline with a full presentation of the benefits that the current Ray Tracing algorithms bring and how much the new Path Tracing approach changes the way we think of the next-generation rendering used in AAA open-world games.
The presentation is aimed at people familiar with the current lighting pipelines who want to better understand what kind of impact Path Tracing can have on the AAA content. Being familiar with Ray Tracing in general and sampling algorithms (e.g. ReSTIR DI) or denoising is an extra benefit.
If the path tracer does work well, then the game is going to look even better. My only concern is the kind of impact it could have on performance, especially on older RTX 30 or 20-series graphics cards. If you thought that the current RT implementation was good enough, then things might get even better in the near future.
Let us know what you think about Path Tracing being added to Cyberpunk 2077 RT Overdrive and whether or not you are interested in checking out this feature once it is available in the game. If you are interested in more content related to the game, then you can check out our Cyberpunk 2077 guides hub.