Cyberpunk 2077’s RT Overdrive Mode finally arrives next month

For all of its faults, Cyberpunk 2077 is a gorgeous looking game – especially when running on a high-end machine with all of its many ray-tracing features enabled. That said, the team at CD Projekt Red have teased that they plan to bring full path-tracing to the game via an ‘RT Overdrive Mode’. During GDC 2023, it was announced that path-tracing will be arriving next month as part of Cyberpunk 2077’s 1.62 update.

Making the announcement at the 2023 Game Developers Conference – and via Nvidia’s blog – it was revealed that the long-awaited RT Overdrive mode would be launching on the 11th of April via a technology preview, bringing full path-tracing to the open-world title.

For the uninitiated, path-tracing (also known as full ray-tracing) “accurately simulates light throughout an entire scene” meaning “practically all light sources cast physically correct soft shadows. Natural colored lighting also bounces multiple times throughout Cyberpunk 2077’s world, creating more realistic indirect lighting and occlusion.”

So far we have seen path tracing come to a small number of games, including the likes of Minecraft, Portal and Quake II. Cyberpunk 2077 is by far the most demanding of these titles without path-tracing, and so it will be interesting to see how the game looks and performs when the RT Overdrive mode releases on the 11th of April.

KitGuru says: Are you excited for this new RT mode? Will your PC be able to handle it? Let us know down below.

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