@CapFrameX on Twitter report Cyberpunk 2077 may add support for real-time Neural Radiance Caching for Nvidia’s Path Tracing Technology (NRC) in the near future. This greatly improves the image quality of Cyberpunk 2077’s new RT Overdrive feature and reduces noise in some of the game’s path tracing effects.
NRC is a relatively new Nvidia technology announced. back in 2021. The key to this technique is the use of neural networks to approximate the radiance field of the path tracing pipeline. According to Nvidia, this AI technology adapts to the scene on-the-fly using training methods that work during the rendering process.
AI can handle fully dynamic scenes, making no educated guesses about scene lighting, geometry, and materials. The AI model also supports self-training and can simulate infinite bounce transport after training with just a few bounce updates.
As a demonstration, Nvidia shared videos and images in their original presentation, detailing the benefits of NRC compared to regular path tracing without denoising filters or ReSTIR (another type of denoiser). In both media formats, NRC very significantly outperformed his ReSTIR, delivering image quality very close to the reference image.
Unfortunately, according to Nvidia, the addition of NRC guarantees a performance cost of around 2.6ms at 1080p. So it’s not a free quality upgrade compared to pure path tracing without the denoiser. However, NVIDIA has demonstrated that NRC is about 9%-23% faster than ReSTIR, so there are advantages.
We don’t know how NRC will perform in Cyberpunk 2077, but we can definitely see a noticeable improvement in overall game image quality in RT Overdrive mode, with fewer artifacts and more vivid certain lighting effects. You can judge. Additionally, with Cyberpunk 2077 using ReSTIR as its current denoiser, we can also expect a healthy framerate boost once the game transitions to his NRC.
