Watch Cyberpunk 2077's RT Overdrive Mode Bring An RTX 4090 To Its Knees Without DLSS

Despite that the terms "ray-tracing" and "path tracing" are academically synonymous, NVIDIA seems to have decided that it will use "path tracing" as a keyword to describe games that are no longer rendered with a hybrid raster-and-RT paradigm and instead "fully ray-traced." Indeed, as that phrase implies, ray-tracing applies to every single light source in Cyberpunk 2077 with RT Overdrive enabled.


NVIDIA says that the new mode will deliver "physically-correct shadows, reflections, and global illumination on all objects." This is impressive when you apply it to something like Minecraft or Quake II, but it is an entirely other level of insanity in a game like Cyberpunk 2077. If you haven't played the game yet, its environments are ludicrously detailed despite existing within a fairly expansive open world. Judgement of how "good" something looks is always subjective, of course. With that in mind, some folks seem to prefer the non-RT presentation, and that's understandable. Eschewing physical accuracy and realism in favor of a certain visual style or theme may be preferable to some—to say nothing of the performance gains to be had by doing so.
Indeed, as you might expect, this is going to come with an even larger performance penalty than the game's current ray-tracing options. In NVIDIA's own video, the framerate drops into the teens when trying to play this mode on a mighty GeForce RTX 4090 in 4K resolution. However, enabling DLSS Super Resolution upscaling as well as DLSS 3 Frame Generation apparently takes the same daytime street scene from about 17 FPS to over 120.

Interestingly, it doesn't look like RT Overdrive will necessarily require a GeForce RTX 40 series GPU. NVIDIA says that it "recommends" such a card for the mode, and certainly the high RT performance of Ada Lovelace (particularly given the optimizations in this mode for the architecture, including the use of Shader Execution Reordering) will mean that those cards dominate performance-wise, but it does look like it may be possible to attempt RT Overdrive on other high-end PC hardware—just don't expect it to come to current-gen consoles. We'll see about giving it a test when the update hits on the 11th.