NVIDIA teases Ray Tracing: Overdrive, RTXDI, DLSS 3 for Cyberpunk 2077

NVIDIA announced its huge upgrade in DLSS 3 upscaling technology with its Ada Lovelace GPU architecture reveal, where GeForce RTX 40 series GPU owners are in for a real, real huge performance leap with DLSS 3.

Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the best-looking games on PC, and it is super-powered with ray tracing enabled and then performance-boosted with DLSS 2.x but the new update coming for the game will insert DLSS 3 that will drive performance on RTX 40 series GPUs through the roof.

CD PROJEKT RED will push out a new update for Cyberpunk 2077 that will add a new Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode that will boost the level of detail in the already beautifully-detailed game even higher. We have NVIDIA RTX Direct Illumination (RTXDI) which will make every single neon sign, street lamp, car headlight, LED billboard and TV accurate ray-traced lighting and shadows, bathing objects, walls, passing cars and pedestrians in accurate colored lighting.

Cyberpunk 2077's new update and Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode will have ray-traced indirect lighting and reflections that are capable of bouncing multiple times, compared to the previous solution and its single bounce.

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NVIDIA says that we'll see even more accurate, realistic and immersive global illumination, reflections, and self-reflections. NVIDIA also says that the new Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode also has improved, more physically-based lighting that removes the need for any other occlusion techniques.

NVIDIA has some specific technologies that super-charge the performance and quality of advanced ray tracing workloads, where GeForce RTX 40 series graphics cards will enjoy some rather performance boosts thanks to the new Ada Lovelace GPU architecture.

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Cyberpunk 2077 with DLSS off vs DLSS 3 on offering some mind-boggling performance boosts

The new Cyberpunk 2077 update will -- when joined with NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 40 series graphics cards -- will enjoy a few different performance and image quality benefits:

• Shader Execution Reordering (SER), which reorders and parallelizes the execution of threads that trace rays without compromising image quality.
• Opacity Micromaps - Accelerate ray tracing workloads by encoding the surface opacity directly onto the geometry, drastically reducing expensive opacity evaluation during ray traversal and enabling higher quality acceleration structures to be constructed. This technique is especially beneficial when applied to irregularly-shaped or translucent objects, like foliage and fences. On GeForce RTX 40 Series graphics cards, the Opacity Micromap format is directly decodable by ray tracing hardware, improving performance even further.
• NVIDIA Real Time Denoisers (NRD) - A spatio-temporal ray tracing denoising library that assists in denoising low ray-per-pixel signals with real-time performance. Compared to previous-gen denoisers, NRD improves quality and ensures the computationally intensive ray-traced output is noise-free, without performance tradeoffs.

Jakub Knapik, Art Director at CD PROJEKT RED, said: "Here at CD PROJEKT RED, we are very proud to be technology innovators, and DLSS 3 gives us meaningful performance gains to tackle the addition of even higher levels of ray tracing to deliver a visually rich experience for our gamers".

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Cyberpunk 2077 with DLSS off vs DLSS 3 on offering some mind-boggling performance boosts

• NVIDIA RTX Direct Illumination (RTXDI) gives each neon sign, street lamp, car headlight, LED billboard, and TV accurate ray-traced lighting and shadows, bathing objects, walls, passing cars, and pedestrians in accurate colored lighting;
• Ray-traced indirect lighting and reflections now bounce multiple times, compared to the previous solution's single bounce. The result is even more accurate, realistic and immersive global illumination, reflections, and self-reflections;
• Ray-traced reflections are now rendered at full resolution, further improving their quality;
• Improved, more physically-based lighting removes the need for any other occlusion techniques.