Last year CD PROJEKT RED announced that it was partnering with NVIDIA to bring ray-tracing to the highly-anticipated Cyberpunk 2077. Leveraging the advanced technology of the GeForce RTX line in addition to taking full advantage of DXR Ray Tracing for improved lighting, details were a little scarce outside of the studio noting that ray-tracing would make the neon-lit streets of Night City even more neon and lit. For real-time.

And now we know the full extent of CD PROJEKT RED’s ray-traced goals for Cyberpunk 2077 a full implementation covering illumination, ambient occlusion, shadows, and ray-traced reflections.


Best of all Cyberpunk 2077 will support DLSS 2.0, NVIDIA’s AI-driven rendering technique that is nothing short of stunning – when it made it’s way to Control, the effect of turning it off or on at 4K or 1440p was virtually indistinguishable from the native equivalent. In fact, some scenes looked better. And speaking of Control, with this line-up of RTX-powered effects Cyberpunk 2007 might take the real-time ray-tracing crown in our ranking come November.

Right so even though most us don’t really know what ambient occlusion or diffuse illumination really is even when we do, here’s the breakdown from CD Projekt that covers how RTX On will be the definitive way to play this at launch.

The dramatic increase in image quality resulting from ray tracing greatly increases the sense of immersion, particularly for a game with tons of geometry and complex dynamic lighting such as Cyberpunk 2077.

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. The result is a diffuse shading effect that darkens enclosed and sheltered areas and enhances the rendered image’s overall tone. In Cyberpunk 2077, ray-traced ambient occlusion additionally can be used with local lights to approximate local shadowing effects where shadows are missing.

RAY-TRACED DIFFUSE ILLUMINATION This technique is used to capture sky radiance as well as emissive lighting from various surfaces, which is difficult to achieve with traditional rendering techniques.

RAY-TRACED SHADOWS Cyberpunk 2077 preview build supports directional shadows from the sun and the moon. These shadows aim to be physically accurate and even account for light scattering from clouds. Shadows may be enhanced in the final release to support other types of light sources where it is needed.

Although those descriptions don’t exactly paint a picture it’s best to think of the effect as cinematic and movie-like, in that everything will look and feel more realistic. CD PROJEKT RED plans to incorporate ray-traced reflections prior to launch, and on that note it’s working closely with NVIDIA to leverage all the cutting-edge technology from the DirectX 12 Ultimate API (which is supported by the Xbox Series X console) that goes beyond ray-tracing. New techniques and advances that like DLSS will offer performance increases without sacrificing image quality.

CD PROJEKT notes that it’s “continuing to optimize performance and image quality of ray-tracing in Cyberpunk 2077 as launch approaches”, and with its November debut probably lining up with NVIDIA’s next-generation of RTX cards the best launch title of 2020 might not even be on a console.