Tech Focus: Cyberpunk 2077 RT Overdrive – How Is Path Tracing Possible on a Triple-A Game?



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How far we’ve come! Path tracing is the ultimate form of ray tracing and somehow, in just a few years, we’ve gone from a path-traced Quake 2 to a path-traced Cyberpunk 2077! How is this possible? In this Tech Focus video, Alex explains the combination of hardware improvements since the launch of RTX 20 Series, working in combination with radically more advanced software and the rise of AI-generated pixels – everything coming together to push in-game visuals further than they ever have before.

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28 thoughts on “Tech Focus: Cyberpunk 2077 RT Overdrive – How Is Path Tracing Possible on a Triple-A Game?”

  1. 17:00 is what I was waiting to hear. I want to know when we will finally have old games with full tracing. I would love to see QUAKE and Splinter Cell and such with at least 3 bounces for every light source and surface. For that reason, I would rather see SC get a ray tracing remaster than the remake that they’re working on. Is something like QUAKE 3 years away; 5 years; 10?

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  2. Although people are quite impressed with the visual fidelity of Overdrive mode, I personally, as I have been working with path tracers for over 20 years am quite unimpressed, yes its running in Realtime, which is really the impressive feat here, but it is so biased that everything looks very unnatural. I think in 2 or 3 gpu generations we will look back at cyberpunk and chuckle a bit at how people were so in awe of it. We are still going to need quite a bit more gpu power to get close to those unbiased spectral renderers we are used to render with "offline"

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  3. Great to see another update, however I’ve only just purchased 2077 (on sale) and still can’t believe the issues! It’s been out for years and still full of glaring bugs…. How bad was it on launch 😂😅

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  4. Meanwhile people in the comment section will still be like "cyberpunk bad, ray tracing sucks" even when put in front of a literal tech miracle. Ignorance is one hell of a thing

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  5. Most of my time playing this game is spent looking at lighting scenarios on walls. Sometimes I'll hear a radio, seek out the radio, assualt the group of people standing around the radio, turn it off and go back to looking at walls.

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  6. I'm glad DF makes high quality videos like these, talking about the many technologies that are used to make path tracing work in a triple A game like Cyberpunk 2077 without cutting much of the technical parts. I might not understand 100% of what was said, but I'm glad I know at least names and overview of techs used

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