Cyberpunk 2077’s neon-illuminated environments are key to its aesthetic, and with the new Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode their level of detail is taken to the next level:
- NVIDIA RTX Direct Illumination (RTXDI) gives each neon sign, street lamp, car headlight, LED billboard and TV accurate ray-traced lighting and shadows, bathing objects, walls, passing cars and pedestrians in accurate colored lighting
- Ray-traced indirect lighting and reflections now bounce multiple times, compared to the previous solution’s single bounce. The result is even more accurate, realistic and immersive global illumination, reflections, and self-reflections
- Ray-traced reflections are now rendered at full resolution, further improving their quality
- Improved, more physically-based lighting removes the need for any other occlusion techniques
Supporting the new Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode are several new NVIDIA technologies that greatly accelerate and improve the quality of advanced ray tracing workloads, for even faster performance when playing on GeForce RTX 40 Series graphics cards:
- Shader Execution Reordering (SER) reorders and parallelizes the execution of threads that trace rays, without compromising image quality.
- Opacity Micromaps accelerate ray tracing workloads by encoding the surface opacity directly onto the geometry, drastically reducing expensive opacity evaluation during ray traversal, and enabling higher quality acceleration structures to be constructed. This technique is especially beneficial when applied to irregularly-shaped or translucent objects, like foliage and fences. On GeForce RTX 40 Series graphics cards, the Opacity Micromap format is directly decodable by ray tracing hardware, improving performance even further.
- NVIDIA Real Time Denoisers (NRD) is a spatio-temporal ray tracing denoising library that assists in denoising low ray-per-pixel signals with real-time performance. Compared to previous-gen denoisers, NRD improves quality and ensures the computationally intensive ray-traced output is noise-free, without performance tradeoffs.
