Cyberpunk 2077 is about to receive an all-new graphical upgrade through its long-awaited Overdrive RT settings, but the latest batch of information surrounding this feature has made it clear that it won't be easy to run by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, it looks increasingly more obvious that CP2077 with Overdrive RT enabled will be this generation's equivalent of Crysis.
Though it had its fair share of difficulties upon launch, Cyberpunk 2077 has managed to turn things around in the time since. Not only is it getting the aforementioned visual bump-up, but there's also a major new DLC on the way, on top of several years' worth of updates and free content releases that the developer, CDPR, had been working on in the time interim.
Graphics card manufacturer Nvidia has just published a new blog post discussing Cyberpunk 2077's new RT Overdrive graphics settings, which are coming as part of the game's April 11 content update. Turning RT Overdrive on essentially replaces the game's default lighting engine with a fully ray-traced alternative that looks remarkably realistic in motion. Also known as path tracing, this lighting technique is incredibly hardware-intensive, to the point where running it with no upscaling in place absolutely trounces Nvidia's most powerful graphics processor, the RTX 4090.
Indeed, even the super-powered RTX 4090 can only pull off a meager 16 FPS when running Cyberpunk 2077 with Overdrive RT turned on, which truly drives home the fact that path tracing is a forward-looking technology as a whole. Yet, Nvidia GPU owners need not fret, as the company's video showcase explains that Nvidia DLSS AI-based upscaling will make the game playable in the vast majority of cases, especially for RTX 4000 users.
Cyberpunk 2077's DLSS 3.0 implementation has been available for some time now, allowing RTX 4000 users to leverage their graphics cards' dedicated AI hardware to generate frames on the fly. This is precisely what allows RTX 4090 to run CP2077 at over 100 FPS even with Overdrive Ray Tracing settings enabled, as long as the player doesn't mind relying on upscaling technologies to pull that off.
Whatever the case may be, the simple fact that the gargantuan RTX 4090 can't get even 30 FPS at a native resolution with these settings means that the game has, essentially, been future-proofed for the time being. For better or for worse, Cyberpunk 2077 is bound to be this generation's Crysis, and the curious bit is that an actual Crysis 4 is now in development, potentially spelling bad, but strangely nostalgic news for veteran PC gamers.
Cyberpunk 2077 is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
Source: Nvidia