Cyberpunk 2077’s RT: Overdrive mode is now available on PC

Last year when Nvidia first announced DLSS 3 and its new RTX 40 series graphics cards, the company teased us with an upcoming RT Overdrive mode for Cyberpunk 2077, adding full path tracing effects to the game. Now after months of additional development, the new graphics mode has arrived on PC. 

Today, Patch 1.62 is rolling out for Cyberpunk 2077 on PC. The headlining change with this patch is the addition of the RT Overdrive mode. This replaces the game's other ray-tracing techniques with full patch-traced lighting. While the patch notes make it sound like you can't turn RT Overdrive mode on without an RTX 4070 Ti or better graphics card, Hardware Unboxed has managed to get it running on an RTX 2060, an RX 6500 XT and even a Zen 4 iGPU. With that said, none of these GPUs can achieve truly playable frame rates, so while it is good for a quick look out of curiosity, you'll need a DLSS 3 compatible graphics card if you want to actually play the game with these settings.

I don't have an RTX 4080 myself, but I do have access to GeForce Now's RTX 4080 servers. Using this, I was able to quickly jump in and see the new RT: Overdrive mode in action. It is very impressive and with DLSS Frame Generation switched on, you'll get very good frame rates, usually hitting over 100FPS in the centre of Night City. However, I do think I encountered a bug, as when I skipped from day to night time, the city effectively went pitch black, so that might be something that needs addressing.

If you have an older ray-tracing capable graphics card that can't run the RT: Overdrive mode at playable frame rates, CD Projekt Red has put a middle-ground solution in place. You can switch on Path Traced rendering in the game's photo mode, so you can quickly compare. As the photo mode only needs to render one frame, rather than multiple frames per second, it is more easily accessible on a wider range of hardware.

Aside from RT: Overdrive, today's Cyberpunk 2077 patch also adds DLAA, Nvidia's AI-based anti-aliasing solution, in addition to Intel XeSS 1.1 and an improved in-game benchmarking tool.

KitGuru Says: Have you checked out Cyberpunk 2077's new RT Overdrive mode yet? 

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