On Tuesday, CD Projekt Red rolled out patch 1.62 for Cyberpunk 2077, bringing Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode to the masses. Well, the masses with seriously powerful computers, anyway. Currently, the new graphics preset is only supported by NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 Series (4070 Ti and up) graphics cards. You can also play it on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090, but only at 1080p and 30FPS. If your graphics card isn’t up to snuff, you’re out of luck.
What is Cyberpunk 2077’s RT: Overdrive Mode?
As CD Projekt Red explains, Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode is a new, fully ray-traced rendering mode (aka path tracing) for Cyberpunk 2077. Basically, it enhances all of the lighting effects to make them look even more realistic. Every light source can cast active shadows, and the light itself can bounce multiple times between different surfaces.
You can see path tracing in action in the demo video from NVIDIA below:
“However, because it is so new and fundamentally different from what we’ve been using so far, we know it’s not going to be perfect from the start and players might experience some issues – that’s why we’ve decided to call it a “Technology Preview,”” the developer explains in a blog post about patch 1.62. “This is a vision of the future that we want to share, and we’re committed to continue working on and improving this feature.”
If you have a supported graphics card and you want to enable the new mode, go to Settings > Graphics > Quick Preset and choose Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode. You can also just enable Path Tracing under the Ray Tracing section in Settings > Graphics.
Also, be sure to update your NVIDIA Game Ready Driver to at least version 531.41.
Even if your computer can’t handle the new rendering mode, you might still be able to take path-traced screenshots in Photo Mode. If your graphics card has at least 8GB of VRAM, you can enable Path Tracing for Photo Mode in Settings > Graphics in the Ray Tracing section.
