Nvidia is new YouTube videos This morning, we see Cyberpunk 2077’s new RT Overdrive mode in action on the GeForce RTX 4090. The graphics are incredible, but so is the RTX 4090’s performance hit. A fully path-traced renderer puts the RTX 4090 at a snail’s pace, allowing you to play games natively at just 16 FPS with the mode active. DLSS 3 frame generation and upscaling were required to achieve good frame rates. But let’s take a step back and analyze exactly what we’re talking about here.
RT Overdrive Mode is a new rendering mode added to Cyberpunk 2077. April 11th. (opens in new tab) The new graphics mode replaces the game’s current ray tracing pipeline with a fully integrated path tracing solution that greatly expands the game’s rendering engine. No hybrid rendering, just ray-traced pixels. Nvidia has previously demoed the mode, and the first launch of RTX ray tracing per pixel compared to just 39 ray calculations per pixel in one of his games, Battlefield V. It states that an average of 635 ray calculations is required.
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Cyberpunk 2077’s usual ray tracing mode was a hybrid rendering solution, consisting of ray-traced reflections, global illumination, and rasterization combined with other effects. A complete path tracing solution simulates all light sources in the game to produce the most realistic lighting, shadows and reflections possible.
All light sources in the game are path traced in conjunction with Nvidia technologies including: NVIDIA Real-Time Denoiser (NRD) (opens in new tab), NVIDIA RTX Direct Illumination (opens in new tab) (RTXDI), and Reorder Shader Executions (SER) (opens in new tab) Improve image quality and speed up performance. This is basically the same overhaul that Nvidia did with Portal RTX, but now applied to a much more modern and demanding game engine.
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Overdrive is the new crisis
Nvidia’s YouTube video shows the ridiculous performance penalty of running a AAA title like Cyberpunk 2077 with full-blown path tracing enabled. Nvidia used his GeForce RTX 4090 to run the Overdrive tech demo at his 4K resolution, but the GPU was at its native resolution and he didn’t even hit 30FPS.
To achieve playable frame rates, Nvidia used a combination of DLSS 3 frame generation and image upscaling (DLSS 2 performance mode) to bring frame rates back into the triple digits. This is similar to Portal RTX, another fully path traced game that also required DLSS 3 frame generation and/or upscaling for the RTX 4090 to achieve playable frame rates.
This shows how demanding the 3D light simulation is compared to just faking it. But thankfully, you can now do high-quality light simulations in real time, which usually requires upscaling to get a decent frame rate.
We don’t yet know the system requirements for this new overdrive mode, but we’ve decided to use overdrive mode at high frame rates. Considering Nvidia was running on his 4K he could probably get decent performance at 1080p on a much more powerful GPU than the RTX 4090 and Cyberpunk 2077 on his DLSS 2 and AMD FSR 2.1 supports both upscaling.
We’ll have to see what performance we get on other GPUs when the free update goes live on April 11th.
