Cyberpunk 2077 Receives Path Tracing In April

CD Projekt Red revealed that Cyberpunk 2077 will get path tracing on April 11. This announcement was made at the Game Developers Conference.

Path tracing is also known as "full ray tracing," which is used to simulate how light acts in scenes and environments. It traces the way light bounces off of objects in different ways in a way that makes those scenes and environments hyper-realistic.

"This not only gives better visuals to the players but also has the promise to revolutionize the entire pipeline of how games are being created," said Nvidia senior technology developer engineer Pawel Kozlowski in a statement.

The technology preview at GDC titled Cyberpunk 2077's Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode shows that virtually all light sources cast physically correct soft shadows and natural-colored lighting reflects throughout the game's world. This results in more realistic indirect lighting and occlusion.

Nvidia explained that the arrival of GeForce RTX GPUs with RT Cores and the AI-powered acceleration of Nvidia DLSS allowed path tracing to occur. Previously, path tracing was almost impossible because of how GPU-intensive the process was.

Last year, Nvidia said that path tracing was on the horizon, and now it looks like it's finally here. There are other games that utilize path tracings, such as Portal.

CD Projekt Red is currently working on the Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty expansion, which is expected to release later in 2023 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S.