Cyberpunk 2077 Gets a Tracing Showcase, Ready to Make Your GPUs Sweat
At GDC, NVIDIA and CD Projekt will present emerging technology that will take graphics to the next level.
In 2018, NVIDIA surprised the market by introducing the first GPUs capable of accelerating real-time ray tracing in games. It took many months for early game developers to support this technology and even longer for the power of the graphics card to catch up with performance.
Ray tracing technology is now supported by AMD and Intel, but NVIDIA is already looking to the future to further support ray tracing with RTX 40 GPUs. This technology will be available with the new Cyberpunk 2077 game setting called “RT: Overdrive”.
Ray tracing and path tracing are two popular methods used in computer graphics to simulate the behavior of light in a virtual environment. Ray tracing is a deterministic process that consists of following the trajectory of light rays and their interactions. This technique requires a lot of processing power. However, it produces high-quality images with accurate reflections, refractions, and shadows.
By contrast, path tracking is a randomly calculated process that involves sampling light paths as they move through a scene. This technique is less computationally expensive than ray tracing, but it can produce noisy images that require many iterations to converge to a high-quality result. Path tracking is commonly used in applications that require physically accurate light simulations, such as architectural visualization and product design. However, it is still not commonly used in games.
Ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077, Source: NVIDIA
Until now, NVIDIA has shown routing in its graphics demos, such as Quake 2 RTX or Portal RTX. However, even with the most powerful GPUs, frame rates were very low, especially without the magic of DLSS (upscaling).
At GDC, CD Projekt and NVIDIA will be introducing a new game setting called ‘RT: Overdrive’. This mode is to enable route tracking in Cyberpunk 2077, which would be the first modern AAA game to support this technology.
‘Cyberpunk 2077’ RT: Overdrive: Bringing Routing to the Night City (Brought to you by NVIDIA)
CD Projekt RED’s Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the most technically challenging games on the market thanks to its massive global scale and visual variety. Its neon-lit environments and expansive views of Night City are already pushing the limits of what’s currently possible in real-time graphics. RT: Overdrive mode aims to take it to the next level by bringing RTX Path Tracing into the mix.
We are all very familiar with the limitations of current direct and indirect lighting algorithms in real time. Things like lights that don’t cast shadows with a range not based on physics, low-resolution indirect light multiplied by screen-space ambient occlusion, or screen-space reflections are still widely used. While they offer satisfactory performance on lower-end hardware, they limit maximum image quality and reduce content creator flexibility.
RTX Path Tracing aims to minimize the constraints placed on content creators by delivering smooth, pixel-perfect shadows and indirect light contribution in fully dynamic environments of all lights, whether it be an analytical local light, an emissive surface, a skylight. , whatever.
Join our session to discover how the new unified lighting pipeline created by RTX Path Tracing core algorithms can improve in-game image fidelity while simplifying direct and indirect lighting pipeline simultaneously.
Welcome to the future!
The GDC session is now scheduled for March 22 and will be available to registered attendees. This is not a public showcase for gamers, but rather a tech demo for developers who want to understand how path tracking works in games.
Source: GDC via Wccftech, CapFrameX
