


Now, if you watch that video and think, "So, what's all the hubbub about," you're not alone. Finally, in the bottom right is the Ultra preset (no ray tracing) running at native resolution. The top-right has RT Overdrive with DLSS Quality mode and Frame Generation enabled (the "actually useful" mode for most people), while the bottom-left uses the previously maximum quality RT Ultra preset with DLSS Quality upscaling and Frame Generation.
CYBERPUNK 2077 PC BENCHMARK TEST 1080P
But it's also during the daylight hours, so once you head outside, comparisons become a bit less representative of what you might experience while playing the game in the evening hours.Īnyway, in the top-left is RT Overdrive running at native 1080p with no upscaling. The built-in benchmark is nice because it follows a set path that lasts just over a minute, allowing (somewhat) perfect comparisons between the various rendering modes.
CYBERPUNK 2077 PC BENCHMARK TEST FULL
But, spoiler alert: If you want a snowball's chance in Hades of running the game well while using full path tracing, you're probably going to want an Nvidia RTX 40-series or a high-end 30-series part. Also, you don't need RT Overdrive mode - it doesn't make the story or the gameplay in Cyberpunk 2077 any better (or worse). Of course, you don't need an RTX 4090 to run Cyberpunk 2077's RT Overdrive mode. Here I've captured the game's benchmark on an RTX 4090 running at 1080p using four different settings. Let's first start with a look at visual fidelity. Thankfully, Cyberpunk 2077 also has support for FSR 2.1 and XeSS 1.1 upscaling algorithms, so there's still a chance that non-Nvidia cards will manage playable framerates.Īnd that's what we set out to determine: Just how well can the various graphics cards run RT Overdrive mode, and how much upscaling will you need to hit playable framerates? (Spoiler: On non-Nvidia cards, the answer is "a lot.") For better or worse, you can give path tracing a shot on everything from the original RTX 20-series up through the 40-series, as well as AMD's RX 6000- and 7000-series GPUs and Intel's Arc GPUs. It will look better to someone looking over your shoulder watching you play than it feels, though, so maybe it's great for streamers?īut don't be concerned about some of those proprietary technologies limiting access to RT Overdrive mode. You can see a full breakdown of five games with DLSS 3 support in our RTX 4070 review, but my take is that a 50% increase in frames to screen via Frame Generation feels more like a 10–20 percent improvement in performance. But that last item in particular, Frame Generation, deserves a bit more investigation.Īs I've stated on several occasions, Frame Generation doesn't feel nearly as fast as the inflated numbers in charts might lead you to believe. Maybe in two more generations of hardware, this is the sort of rendering we'll use in future state-of-the-art games. The RT Overdrive settings are a tour de force for Nvidia's RTX hardware, including the beefed-up ray tracing cores, Shader Execution Reordering, Opacity Micro-Maps, and DLSS 3 Frame Generation. It can make the game look better in various ways, but don't let FOMO convince you of the need to upgrade, at least not just yet. We're saying that if you don't have a powerful graphics card, you don't need to feel left out. When we say "fully unnecessary," we're not talking about CD Projekt Red and Nvidia working together to release the full path tracing update. If you're already running RT Ultra settings, the improvements aren't nearly as noticeable - they're still there, but it turns out hybrid rendering does a pretty good job of capturing many of the benefits of ray tracing without having to cast 635 rays per pixel (on average, according to Nvidia).Īnd let's also be clear about the headline.

While the fully path traced version of the game is supposed to make everything look amazing, there's a reason most of the comparisons we've seen show RT Overdrive image quality versus pure rasterization-based rendering. Do you already own one of the best graphics cards? RT Overdrive could leave you longing for an upgrade. That language is important, because it rightly suggests that most people either can't or shouldn't try out the fully path traced rendering mode for what was already a demanding game. In its continuing bid to become the next Crysis, Cyberpunk 2077 recently released the "technology preview" of its RT Overdrive mode.
