Cyberpunk 2077 RT: Overdrive Mode Is the Real Deal, Says Digital Foundry Test

wccftech.com:

The long awaited Cyberpunk 2077 RT: Overdrive Mode, originally announced by NVIDIA and CD Projekt RED for the debut of the GeForce RTX 4000 Series GPUs a few months ago, is just a few hours away.

Tomorrow, the Polish studio is set to release Cyberpunk 2077 update 1.62, which will include the path traced mode developed for high-end PCs as a technology preview. The folks at Digital Foundry were the only ones able to check it out before the April 11th launch date, and their hands-on test is glowing, to say the least.

To begin with, DF's Alexander Battaglia showcased the enormous difference between the rasterized version of the game with the new Cyberpunk 2077 RT: Overdrive Mode. That was hardly surprising, though, as even the rather extensive ray tracing features included when the game launched in December 2020 delivered a significant visual upgrade over the regular rasterization method. In fact, Cyberpunk 2077 already had more ray traced effects than almost any other game:

When we last saw Cyberpunk 2077 RT: Overdrive Mode in action, as part of a behind-the-scenes video with CD Projekt RED programmers and graphics engineers, the path tracing glimpses weren't all that much more impressive than the previous 'Psycho' ray tracing setting available in the game.

Luckily, the new footage shared as part of Digital Foundry's test clearly shows improvements that, in Battaglia's words, are quite large. One example mentioned in the video is local lighting, which was all done in rasterization with the exception of neon lights. As such, many lights in the scenes didn't cast any shadow at all, whereas here, per-pixel soft shadows are realistically borne out of any lights you'll see in the game (and there are a lot in Night City).