RTX On – Nvidia showcases Cyberpunk 2077’s RT Overdrive mode in action

Nvidia showcases high framerates at 4K in Cyberpunk 2077’s RT Overdrive mode with DLSS 3

Cyberpunk 2077’s receiving a new path traced “RT Overdrive” mode on April 11th, enhancing the game with “full ray tracing”, delivering quality levels that are higher than the original game with its ray traced shadows, reflections, and global illumination enabled. With RT Overdrive, ray tracing is taken to the next level, with a full ray tracing model from all light sources to deliver physically correct shadows, reflections, and global illumination. 

Nvidia has worked with CD Project Red to make Cyberpunk 2077’s RT Overdrive mode a reality, taking full advantage of the hardware features of Nvidia’s RTX 40 series hardware. This includes support for DLSS 3.0 (DLSS Super Sampling and DLSS Frame Generation), and support for the RTX 40 series’ Shader Execution Reordering (SER) feature. 

In the trailer below, Nvidia showcases how RT Overdrive mode impacts Cyberpunk 2077’s visuals, and how Nvidia’s RTX features enable high levels of game performance at 4K with RT Overdrive mode enabled. In one scene, Nvidia’s RTX 4090 ran at 29 FPS at 4K, but with DLSS 3 enabled the same scene ran at 115 FPS. That’s a performance increase of almost 4x, thanks to Nvidia’s RTX features. 

Nvidia’s performance gains through their RTX features comes from DLSS Super Resolution and DLSS Frame Generation, both of which utilise the AI power of Nvidia’s RTX 40 series GPUs to function. DLSS Super Resolution creates higher resolution frames from lower resolution renderings, (Upscaling 1080p to 4K in DLSS Performance Mode), and DLSS Frame Generation adds AI generation intermediate frames between traditionally generated frames. When combined, it is easy to see how Nvidia’s RTX 4090 can have its performance boosted by almost 4x when using DLSS 3.

Cyberpunk 2077’s RT overdrive mode is going to be one of Nvidia’s biggest RTX showpieces to date, showcasing the potential of ray tracing in games and the capabilities of Nvidia’s RTX technologies. Ray tracing and AI are a powerful combination, and if Nvidia are clever, they will be working with developers to add equivalent “RT Overdrive” modes to other games.

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