Cyberpunk 2077 May Receive Support for NVIDIA’s Neural Radiance Cache Tech

wccftech.com:

There's no doubt that Cyberpunk 2077 is currently the most technologically advanced game available. The first-person open world RPG/shooter was already packed with ray tracing when it launched in late 2020, but CD Projekt RED kicked it all up a notch with last month's release of the path tracing technology preview, also known as RT Overdrive Mode.

Arguably the main addition was RTX Direct Illumination. Originally unveiled by NVIDIA at GTC 2021, RTXDI enables a much greater number of dynamic lights casting rays at the same time. Here's how it affects the Cyberpunk 2077 path tracing technology preview, as CDPR's Jakub Knapik explained in an exclusive interview with Wccftech.

RTXDI is responsible for Direct Illumination, which means it’s responsible for giving information about the light that comes from a source and hits a surface. Previously, shadowing used to be a very painful part of the process. In games, we use a shadow budget, meaning that we can only cast shadows from carefully selected lights in our game. In many cases, we also use very inaccurate shadow maps. So imagine a busy street, with only a few lights capable of casting a shadow, while most of them just light through objects, making them look very unrealistic and disconnected from the surroundings. With RTXDI, we get up to a thousand or even more lights casting super realistic soft shadows on the screen. Practically every light you see casts shadows. That is a fundamental change in realism, depth of the scene, and dimensionality. But it is also a critical element if we assume that every light source, be it a lamp, neon, or screen, is emitting an Indirect Illumination, meaning light that bounces off of surfaces in the world. Without proper shadows in the