Cyberpunk 2077 was updated this week on PC with a new Ray Tracing: Overdrive mode, which introduces path tracing to the game, making it one of the most, if not the most, best-looking games to date. However, not many users can enjoy the game with path tracing at decent performance, as only NVIDIA RTX 40 series GPUs can do so.
Thankfully, this may no longer be the case, thanks to the Ray Tracing: Overdrive Optimizations mod released on Nexus Mods by Erok. This tweaked .ini file reduced ray bounces from 2 to 1 and the far range of the rays to 1600 from the original 2000 without removing any of the new features introduced by the new mode. While these tweaks do bring some visual changes, especially for dark areas, the performance improvements on non-RTX 40 series GPUs make using these optimizations well worth it, as highlighted by the comparison videos below captured on an RTX 3060 Ti.
As mentioned above, only the NVIDIA RTX 40 series GPUs can manage to run Cyberpunk 2077 in Ray Tracing: Overdrive, but even the RTX 4090 cannot do so properly without the help of DLSS, as highlighted by Alessio in his piece. Even if it is so demanding, path tracing really looks glorious, so hopefully, the technology will be improved in the future to allow more users to experience it even on non-high-end hardware.
Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode isn’t the only new feature brought by the Cyberpunk 2077 1.62 patch. Alongside adding path tracing support, the patch introduced NVIDIA DLAA and Intel XeSS support. You can find the full patch notes here.
Cyberpunk 2077 is now available on PC, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and Xbox One worldwide. The game’s expansion, Phantom Liberty, the studio’s most expensive to date, will be released later this year on PC and current generation consoles only.
