From a technical perspective, Cyberpunk is just as impressive as long as you have the hardware for it. CD Project RED revamped their RedEngine, which powered The Witcher 3 back in the day. It's now running on DirectX 12 with support for Global Illumination and raytracing. No support for variable rate shading, mesh shaders, or sample feedback by the way, so it's not a full "DirectX 12 Ultimate" title. The Global Illumination system works great without raytracing and is capable of handing the full day/night cycle while keeping everything lit (mostly) properly.
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The artists did fantastic work and achieved great things when it comes to lighting. While playing the game, I often thought "wow, how does this look with RT off?" and vice versa. In several cases, I found the non-RT lighting better even though I realized it wasn't as physically accurate as the raytraced version. During normal gaming, you'd never realize that; you'd have to look for it. Digging deeper into the RT effects, I'm also slightly surprised that many corners have been cut to help with performance. Theoretically, the promise of raytracing is "physically accurate," but in Cyberpunk, I can't even see myself in RT reflections? Only light from the sun and moon is used for raytraced shadows, and reflections are limited in how often they can bounce. Now, this kind of a compromise of course makes sense to achieve better performance, but it's still an important argument to understand the technology.
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Given the massive raytracing performance hit of around 50%, we definitely need to focus on getting raytracing performance to usable levels first before dialing up the RT details even further. NVIDIA's DLSS technology can help with that as it renders the game at lower resolution and then uses an advanced upscaling algorithm to get you a high-quality anti-aliased output that looks nearly identical to the default TAA anti-aliasing filter at native resolution. At this time, Cyberpunk 2077 supports raytracing only on NVIDIA's RTX platform. AMD Radeon users will have to wait a bit longer, support is coming in a future patch. By the way, we did test the final public release version of Cyberpunk with the latest 1.03 patch and the game-ready drivers from AMD and NVIDIA.