Cyberpunk 2077 RT: Overdrive Mode Is the Real Deal, Says Digital Foundry Test

The long awaited Cyberpunk 2077 RT: Overdrive Mode, originally announced by NVIDIA and CD Projekt RED for the debut of the GeForce RTX 4000 Series GPUs a few months ago, is just a few hours away.

Tomorrow, the Polish studio is set to release Cyberpunk 2077 update 1.62, which will include the path traced mode developed for high-end PCs as a technology preview. The folks at Digital Foundry were the only ones able to check it out before the April 11th launch date, and their hands-on test is glowing, to say the least.

To begin with, DF’s Alexander Battaglia showcased the enormous difference between the rasterized version of the game with the new Cyberpunk 2077 RT: Overdrive Mode. That was hardly surprising, though, as even the rather extensive ray tracing features included when the game launched in December 2020 delivered a significant visual upgrade over the regular rasterization method. In fact, Cyberpunk 2077 already had more ray traced effects than almost any other game:

• Shadows
• Local shadows
• Reflections
• Diffused illumination
• Ambient occlusion
• Single pass global illumination

When we last saw Cyberpunk 2077 RT: Overdrive Mode in action, as part of a behind-the-scenes video with CD Projekt RED programmers and graphics engineers, the path tracing glimpses weren’t all that much more impressive than the previous ‘Psycho’ ray tracing setting available in the game.

Luckily, the new footage shared as part of Digital Foundry’s test clearly shows improvements that, in Battaglia’s words, are quite large. One example mentioned in the video is local lighting, which was all done in rasterization with the exception of neon lights. As such, many lights in the scenes didn’t cast any shadow at all, whereas here, per-pixel soft shadows are realistically borne out of any lights you’ll see in the game (and there are a lot in Night City). Furthermore, the multi-bounce local lighting also affects the color of the lights, which in turn bounces off environments. If your car light is pointed at a red container, it’ll naturally extend a red glow to nearby surfaces.

Likewise, indirect lighting was mostly handled with the traditional IBL (image-based lighting) probes, leading to wildly incorrect lights when compared to the new path traced Cyberpunk 2077 RT: Overdrive Mode.

The overall look of the game is much more consistent, according to the report, though it comes with a significant performance cost. While the test didn’t go too in-depth on this front, it did highlight a particular scene where Overdrive was running at 18 FPS versus 40 FPS with Psycho RT (and DLAA) and 48 FPS with rasterized graphics.

The solution is, of course, activating NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Super Sampling upscaler, both 2 (Super Resolution) and 3 (Frame Generation). DLSS Super Resolution performance mode more than triples that 18 FPS to 59 FPS, while activating Frame Generation nearly doubles the frame rate again to 95 FPS on an RTX 4090 GPU, providing a very smooth gameplay experience with incredible visuals, according to Digital Foundry.

I’m very eager to check out Cyberpunk 2077 RT: Overdrive mode myself. Stay tuned for our hands-on!