Cyberpunk 2077 NVIDIA Ray Tracing Overdrive Mode PC Performance Benchmarks: Path Tracing On A GeForce RTX 4090

Cyberpunk 2077 Patch 1.62 is now available for download which adds support for Path Tracing through the NVIDIA RT Overdrive mode.

The new Cyberpunk 2077 1.62 Patch makes the world of Night City more beautiful and believable with accurate global illumination and shadows achieved through the use of Path Tracing. NVIDIA and CD Projekt Red developers have already stated that the game will become very demanding when RT Overdrive mode is enabled and you will require the best of the best hardware to run it at a stable frame rate. That's one reason this is only a "Technical Preview" for now & standardization of Path Tracing will require further optimizations down the road.

According to Jakub, Ray Tracing in games has more importance in the development process than just looking good. For example, he states that Ray tracing is helping solve some major problems encountered in game development. While ray tracing addresses certain individual elements of the rendering pipeline such as fixing the shadows, the reflections, or the ambient occlusion.

All those element layers are stuck up on top of each other while Path Tracing goes a different route & rather than having to do all those layers individually, it does them all at once in a single proper unified rendering pipeline. Compared to standard ray tracing implementations, the path-traced image is way more balanced, it's way more accurate and also more beautiful. The rendering is said to be similar to the rendering techniques used by animated films in the past which would take the game (Cyberpunk 2077) one step closer to photo-realism.

Cyberpunk 2077 RT Overdrive Mode PC Requirements

As per CD Projekt Red, the NVIDIA RT Overdrive Mode for Cyberpunk 2077 is only supported by the following graphics cards:

If you don't have any of the said GPUs, the feature will be turned off by default as it requires a very high-end GPU due to its demanding nature. CD Projekt Red has also stated previously that the RT Overdrive mode is going to be hardware-agnostic which means that it won't require proprietary technology to run and gamers will be able to enjoy it on any graphics card out there, given that it has the processing and compute prowess to run Path Tracing at a stable frame rate.

But it looks like the rest of the cards with at least 8 GB VRAM will only have the option to take screenshots with the path tracing renderer rather than playing the game in real time. The rationale given for this move is that it means rendering just one frame, as opposed to rendering several frames every second (i.e. FPS), which would happen when playing the game. The path weighs in at 19.6 GB for PC players.

Cyberpunk 2077 RT Overdrive Mode PC Performance Analysis

In the brief time that we had benchmarking through the NVIDIA RT Overdrive mode, we noticed a big visual performance difference between the standard Ray Traced & the Path Traced renderer & as expected, the performance difference is just as big. You are not going to get a framerate above 30 FPS without using DLSS.

Even a card such as the RTX 4090 can not run the game at 4K native res but at 1440P, 40-50 FPS is doable. DLSS 3 is more of a necessity when running RT Overdrive mode but it is been told that CD Projekt Red will continue working with NVIDIA to further optimize the performance of the RT Overdrive mode.

Cyberpunk 2077 RT Overdrive Mode Native 4K (RTX 4090):

Cyberpunk 2077 RT Overdrive Mode DLAA 4K (RTX 4090):

Cyberpunk 2077 RT Overdrive Mode DLSS 2 4K (RTX 4090):

Cyberpunk 2077 RT Overdrive Mode DLSS 3 4K (RTX 4090):

Cyberpunk 2077 Path 1.62 PC Path Notes

Path Tracing: Technology Preview

DLAA

Intel XeSS

Benchmark improvements