Cyberpunk 2077 Available Now With Stunning Ray-Traced Effects and Performance Accelerating NVIDIA DLSS

Cyberpunk 2077 is now available! Play this year’s most anticipated title on a GeForce RTX GPU to experience CD PROJEKT RED’s masterpiece with several ray-traced technologies that amp up the immersiveness, and accelerate your frame rates with NVIDIA DLSS.

With realistic shadows and lighting and the added performance of NVIDIA DLSS, GeForce RTX is the definitive platform for Cyberpunk 2077.

NVIDIA’s worked hand in hand with CD PROJEKT RED to bring ray-traced effects to Cyberpunk 2077. Powered by the platform agnostic DirectX 12 Ultimate API, and accelerated by GeForce RTX’s RT and Tensor Cores, ray tracing enhances Cyberpunk 2077’s world with realistic reflections, improved lighting, enhanced shadowing, and refined ambient occlusion.

“Cyberpunk 2077 is a technologically advanced game capable of generating marvelous visuals. It also boldly spearheads the future of real-time graphics by taking advantage of GeForce RTX 30 Series’ 2nd generation ray tracing and the advanced AI of NVIDIA DLSS. Simulated reflections, lifelike shadows, and true-to-form diffuse illumination and ambient occlusion -- they all make my heart beat faster…”

 - Jakub Knapik, Art Director of Lighting and FX, CD PROJEKT RED”

Accurate real-time reflections are important for realism and immersion, especially in large open world games featuring skyscrapers and innumerable shiny surfaces. Using ray tracing, every suitable surface and object adds these high-quality, realistic reflections, cranking up fidelity for the definitive experience.

Cars reflect the neon lights of Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City, rivers and bodies of water reflect the surrounding detail, glass features transparent reflections, buildings reflect the world around them, and so on. If it’s meant to be reflective, it reflects, giving GeForce RTX gamers the highest possible graphical fidelity.

Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City is filled with neon signs, advertisements, and other artificial light sources. With ray tracing, the light from these sources accurately illuminates surrounding detail, further enhancing image quality and immersion, and making Night City an even more vibrant locale.

Additionally, Cyberpunk 2077 utilises diffuse illumination tech to enhance lighting from the sky dome, enabling light scattered from the atmosphere to realistically illuminate surfaces, and to be accurately occluded by buildings and objects, creating a more natural look that further improves immersion and image quality.

In reality, sunlight bounces, increasing the illumination of nearby surfaces and objects. Furthermore, the colour properties of surfaces are absorbed and added to bounces, so for example, bright light bounced from a red wall to a white tiled floor would feature a tinge of red.

Recreating this effect in games requires ray tracing, and by setting the Ray Traced Lighting option to ‘Psycho’ you can enable it in Cyberpunk 2077.

This effect is applied exclusively to light cast by the sun, with one bounce. It’s demanding, but if your system’s got the headroom to enable it, you’ll experience next-level realism and fidelity.

Using ray tracing, we’re adding an extra level of refinement to shadows created by sunlight and moon light. These are intelligently incorporated with the game’s rasterized local shadows to increase detail, most noticeably on finely-detailed game elements, and to alleviate shadow aliasing and other common issues.

These enhancements help ground objects and shadows, add genuine contact hardening and softening, and in general further improve fidelity, immersion and realism.

Ambient Occlusion generates shadows and adjusts shading where objects and game elements occlude light. This often manifests as the smallest, finest shadows around creases in clothing, between pages of paper, and between keys on a keyboard. Without ambient occlusion, games look flat, objects appear to be floating, and realism is greatly diminished.

With ray tracing, we can crank up the accuracy and quality of the effect, ensuring every nook and cranny is correctly shadowed, further refining image quality and immersion.

Altogether, ray tracing has a transformative effect on the appearance, dynamism and immersion of Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City, and its surrounding zones. If you haven’t already, be sure to check out our new RTX ON trailer at the start of this article to see for yourself.

To accelerate intensive ray-traced graphics, Cyberpunk 2077 has integrated AI-powered NVIDIA DLSS, which increases performance by 60% or more, depending on resolution, settings and system configuration.

Take a look at DLSS’s performance and image quality in this new 2560x1440 “Quality Mode” RTX ON video:

With DLSS, GeForce RTX gamers have the performance headroom to maximise ray tracing settings, increase detail levels, and up the resolution.

Leveraging all the capabilities and advantages exclusive to the GeForce RTX platform, you can enjoy Cyberpunk 2077 with a fantastic level of ray-traced detail at 2560x1440 with a GeForce RTX 3070:

The minimum GPU for Ray Tracing, at 1920x1080, is the GeForce RTX 2060. With the RTX 2060, gamers can explore Night City with Medium Ray Tracing and textures powered by DLSS. And if you want to crank up your 1080p experience, the new GeForce RTX 3060 Ti provides a smooth experience with RT Ultra settings.

At 2560x1440, we recommend a GeForce RTX 3070 or GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. Ray tracing is taken to Ultra, which greatly increases the fidelity of the aforementioned effects, and the distance at which they are visible, while DLSS provides boosted frame rates with uncompromised image quality. And with rasterized settings also being cranked to Ultra, GeForce RTX 3070 and 2080 Ti gamers receive an incredible experience at the highest detail levels, unmatched by any other platform.

And finally, if you’re playing at 4K or beyond, the GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3090 deliver the performance to play Cyberpunk 2077 with ray tracing at Ultra at this incredibly demanding resolution. Both GPUs are powered by Ampere—NVIDIA’s 2nd gen RTX architecture—with dedicated RT Cores for ray tracing, and Tensor Cores for DLSS AI acceleration, delivering an unrivaled cinematic-quality experience.

When you enter the world of Cyberpunk 2077, ensure you have our new Game Ready Driver installed for optimum performance. Grab it from GeForce Experience or GeForce.com.

GeForce Experience also provides one-click optimal settings for Cyberpunk 2077, allowing you to instantly configure the game’s many options for your system’s hardware, immediately giving you optimised gameplay. And using ShadowPlay and the app’s other options, you can record and stream gameplay. Head here to learn more about GeForce Experience’s many capabilities.

If you don’t own a ray tracing-capable PC, you can still experience the beauty of Cyberpunk 2077 with DLSS and ray tracing on GeForce NOW, NVIDIA's cloud game streaming service.

Just in time for today’s Cyberpunk 2077 launch, GeForce NOW has introduced support for GOG.com, enabling gamers to enter Night City in the cloud with their GOG.com versions of the game, as well as those from Steam and the Epic Game Store.

Using the GeForce NOW app on PC, Mac, SHIELD TV, Chromebooks, Android and iOS devices, gamers can also play many other of their favourite already-owned PC titles from popular digital stores like GOG.com, Steam, Epic Games Store and Uplay. Check out our website for all the details.

You’ve waited a long time for CD PROJEKT RED’s Cyberpunk 2077 to be released, so ensure you experience this masterpiece at its best, with the most immersive graphics and realistic visuals, by playing on GeForce RTX system.

As you’re marvelling at the sights of Night City, jump into Cyberpunk 2077’s photo mode and share your best screenshots using #RTXOn, so the world can see what an awesome, amazing experience you’re having in Cyberpunk 2077’s ray-traced, DLSS-enhanced neon city.