CD PROJEKT RED has released a new “Behind the Settings – DLSS 3 & Path Tracing” video for Cyberpunk 2077, and according to Cezary Bella, a graphics programmer who’s featured in the video, players may see a 30 to 40% drop in performance when the game’s new Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode is enabled without the support of NVIDIA DLSS 3. The demands of Cyberpunk 2077’s Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode was already teased last week as part of a 4K Technology Preview Reveal that saw a GeForce RTX 4090 delivering anywhere from 16 to 34 FPS in the game at 4K, and while DLSS 3 is capable of boosting those frame rates to over 100 FPS, Bella’s comments provide further insight into just how serious and demanding path tracing is. Some have labeled Cyberpunk 2077’s Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode as the new Crysis, while NVIDIA critics say that this is just another one of Jensen’s schemes to sell more GPUs every cycle. Cyberpunk 2077’s Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode technology preview will roll out on April 11.
From a CD PROJEKT RED transcript:
Well, it’s going to be pretty expensive. I mean, pretty heavy on the GPU. And we don’t have a precise number, but probably something around 30 percent heaver, 40 percent heavier. But this is where DLSS 3 comes in to help us, because it gives back all the performance, all the frames that we are losing with this high, demanding rendering technique.
It’s literally a totally new way of rendering the game. And obviously, the game is massive and the technology change is huge. So we’re calling it technology preview. So yes, there could be some issues here and there, but we will still keep investing into this. We’re still working on this one and we hope to kind of move it out and wrap it up for the proper next release in the future.