Cyberpunk 2077 PC will include more ray-tracing effects than expected

Cyberpunk 2077’s PC version will include more ray-tracing visual effects than previously thought.

Nvidia announced on Thursday that as part of its technical partnership with developer CD Projekt Red, it has extended the RTX support announced at E3 2019 to a total of four ray-traced effects in the game.

On PC Cyberpunk 2077 will support the following ray-tracing effects:

• Ray-Traced Diffuse Illumination – “This captures sky radiance as well as emissive lighting from various surfaces, which is difficult to achieve with traditional rendering techniques.”
• Ray-Traced Reflections – “In Cyberpunk 2077, ray-traced reflections are used on all surfaces and can trace ranges for up to several kilometers, enabling realistic reflections across vast view distances.”
• Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion – “Ambient occlusion is a shading and rendering technique used to calculate how exposed each point in a scene is to ambient lighting, which results in the rendering of new AO shadows that ground objects and naturally darken surfaces, objects, and other game elements.”
• Ray-Traced Shadows – “Ray tracing enables developers to bring pixel-perfect shadows to games, free from the compromises and limitations of shadow maps.”

Each of these effects is powered by DirectX 12 Ultimate’s DXR Raytracing API, and are optimized for GeForce RTX graphics GPUs. To accompany the announcement, CD Projekt released several Cyberpunk 2077 screenshots showing the ray-tracing effects in action, which you can see below.

In addition to ray-tracing, Nvidia announced that Cyberpunk will support its NVIDIA DLSS 2.0 technology, which claims to use a neural network to boost frame rates without compromising visual quality. The technology is already in several PC games such as Control and Minecraft.

Finally, Nvidia confirmed that Cyberpunk 2077 will be available on its GeForce Now streaming service at launch, with support for ray-tracing effects and DLSS 2.0.

The Cyberpunk 2077 release date was recently delayed by two months to November 19, marking a second delay for the game this year after it slipped from its originally targeted April launch to September.

The company also said it intends to release the “proper, full-blown next-gen version” of Cyberpunk 2077 in 2021, which is very likely to support its own ray-tracing visual effects.