Overdrive Mode In Cyberpunk 2077 RT Is The Real Thing, Says Digital Foundry

(CTN News) – We are only hours away from the release of the long awaited Cyberpunk 2077 RT: Overdrive Mode, originally announced by NVIDIA and CD Projekt RED a few months back to coincide with the debut of the GeForce RTX 4000 Series GPUs.

As a technology preview, Cyberpunk 2077 update 1.62 will include the path traced mode developed for high-end PCs in the upcoming week. In the days leading up to the official launch of the product on April 11th, only Digital Foundry was able to get their hands on it.

The following is what they had to say about their hands-on experience.

First of all, DF’s Alexander Battaglia demonstrated how much different the rasterized version of Cyberpunk 2077 RT: Overdrive Mode is from the rasterized version of the game to the newest version.

As it turned out, however, that wasn’t that surprising, as the rather extensive ray tracing features included with the game when it launched in December 2020 had delivered a significant visual upgrade over the regular rasterization method of rendering graphics.

There were more ray traced effects in Cyberpunk 2077 than almost any other game available at the time:

A shadowy landscape

• Shadows in a localized area

• My reflections

• Lighting that is diffused

• Occlusion due to ambient light

• Illumination of the entire planet in one pass

As part of an exclusive behind-the-scenes video of CD Projekt RED programmers and graphics engineers, when we saw Cyberpunk 2077 RT: Overdrive Mode in action last time, it did not seem like the path tracing glimpses were much more impressive than the previous ‘Psycho’ ray tracing setting that was available.

Thanks to the new footage shared as part of Digital Foundry’s test, the new footage clearly shows improvements that, in Battaglia’s words, are quite significant compared to the previous footage.

Local lighting is an example that is mentioned in the video, which was done in rasterization. Except for neon lights, all of the local lighting was done in rasterization.

Therefore, many of the lights in the scenes did not cast any shadow at all, whereas here, per-pixel shadows are realistically borne out of any light you can see in the game (and there are a lot of them in Night City).

In addition to this, the multi-bounce local lighting also affects the color of the lights, which in turn is reflected back off the environment as it bounces off of it.

The red glow of your car light will naturally extend to nearby surfaces if you point it at a red container, which in turn will radiate a red glow.

Additionally, indirect lighting was mostly handled by the traditional IBL (image-based lighting) probes, leading to wildly inaccurate lights when compared to the newly introduced path traced lighting in Cyberpunk 2077 RT: Overdrive Mode, which has been improved greatly.

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