Nvidia and CDPR to demonstrate path tracing technology using Cyberpunk 2077 at GDC 2023

In 2018, NVIDIA released the first GPU capable of real-time ray tracing in games, which took game developers several months to support and even more time to optimize performance. Now, in addition to NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel also support ray tracing technology.

The GDC 2023 conference will be held on March 20th, and NVIDIA and CD Projekt Red have announced that they will showcase the next generation of path tracing technology using Cyberpunk 2077. The technology will be available in the new version of the game as “RT: Overdrive”.

Ray tracing and path tracing are two popular methods in computer graphics used to simulate the behavior of light in virtual environments. Ray tracing is a deterministic process that involves tracing the path of light and its interactions, requiring a significant amount of processing power. It produces high-quality images with accurate reflections, refractions, and shadows. Path tracing is a random process that involves sampling the path of light as it moves through a scene, and has a lower computational cost than ray tracing, but may produce noisy images that require multiple iterations to obtain a high-quality result. It is generally used for applications that require physically accurate simulation of light, such as architectural visualization and product design, but is less commonly used in games.

NVIDIA has already showcased path tracing in its graphics demos, such as “Quake 2 RTX” or “Portal RTX”. Even with the most powerful GPUs, the frame rates are very low, especially without the support of DLSS. The new version of Cyberpunk 2077 will enable path tracing technology, making it the first 3A game to support this technology.