Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 and the Phantom Liberty expansion on PC have introduced NVIDIA’s DLSS 3.5, which consists of Ray Reconstruction, a new feature available to all GeForce RTX GPU owners to increase the fidelity of ray tracing when upscaling from a lower rendering resolution.
While Cyberpunk 2077 and the other games confirmed to support DLSS 3.5 (Portal RTX and Alan Wake II) all use path tracing, Ray Reconstruction can work with all types of ray tracing, as NVIDIA’s VP of Applied Deep Learning Research Bryan Catanzaro confirmed in the ‘AI Visuals Roundtable’ interview with Digital Foundry.
My opinion is that it works pretty well because actually it’s much easier to do for easier settings. Path Tracing is the grand challenge, right? I think it works pretty well. I think the benefits are more clear, though, in path traced games, which is why we’re focused on that. The base cost of 2 ms (on RTX 4090 at 4K) would be the same.
However, by default, Cyberpunk 2077 only allows users to enable Ray Reconstruction after switching Path tracing on. While that’s by far the best way to experience Night City, it is also prohibitively taxing for nearly all graphics cards that don’t support Frame Generation.
Luckily, there is a tweak that bypasses the default game’s limitation, allowing Ray Reconstruction to be used with ‘regular’ ray tracing. The tweak was originally discovered by Twitter user @RayneYoruka. Here’s how to apply it:
- Launch Cyberpunk 2077 and enable ray tracing (not path tracing) and DLSS Super Resolution.
- Exit the game. Go to your Users/Appdata/Local/CD Projekt Red/Cyberpunk 2077 folder and open the UserSettings.json file.
- Search for the DLSS_D string and set value and default_value from false” to “true”.
- Save the configuration file and set it as “read-only”.
- Launch the game and play with Ray Tracing and DLSS Ray Reconstruction.
If the file somehow gets corrupted, enable and then disable path tracing as explained here.
Whereas Ray Reconstruction actually slightly improves performance in Cyberpunk 2077 when used with path tracing, using this tweak to get it running with regular ray tracing incurs a performance hit, as shown in the above video. However, the quality is significantly improved.
Cyberpunk 2077 modders also found ways to improve ray tracing performance and enable DLAA with Ray Reconstruction, as you can read in this report.
