Cyberpunk 2077 will incorporate path tracing technology, with the new patch set to be released on April 11th

CD Projekt Red announced at the GDC 2023 conference that Cyberpunk 2077 will receive an update on April 11th, featuring the inclusion of path tracing technology and offering the RT Overdrive mode. Following Quake 2: RTX, Minecraft, and Portal, Cyberpunk 2077 will be the fourth game to receive real-time path tracing technology.

As part of the 1.62 update to Cyberpunk 2077, CD Projekt Red will not only add path-tracing technology but also improve ray-tracing performance and make gameplay enhancements, although no specific details have been disclosed.

According to CD Projekt Red and Nvidia, RTX Direct Illumination (RTXDI) will provide precise ray tracing lighting and shadows for each neon light, street light, car headlight, LED billboard, television, enveloping objects, walls, passing vehicles, and pedestrians in accurate colored lighting. Indirect lighting and reflections can now bounce multiple times, instead of only once as in the previous solution, which will evidently become more precise and realistic. Ray-traced reflections are now rendered at full resolution, further improving their quality. The improved lighting is more physics-based, requiring no other occlusion techniques.

The path-traced mode is intended to enhance ray-traced reflections, global illumination, and shadows, providing players with better visual effects. Additionally, shader execution reordering (SER) using the Ada Lovelace architecture can optimize GPU workload, but like NVIDIA DLSS 3, it is only available on GeForce RTX 40 series graphics cards.