Cyberpunk 2077: Ray-Traced Effects Revealed, DLSS 2.0 Supported, Playable On GeForce NOW

CD PROJEKT RED’s The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and its Blood & Wine expansion are the highest-rated action RPGs of the last decade. On November 19^th, the Polish studio is releasing their new game, Cyberpunk 2077, which as one of the year’s most anticipated titles needs little introduction – you’re V, a mercenary in an open world sci-fi megalopolis, and how you look and experience the action-adventure-RPG is up to you.

In addition to featuring CDPR’s fantastic open-ended gameplay, Cyberpunk 2077 is also blessed with jaw-droppingly beautiful, cutting-edge graphics with unprecedented levels of detail, and stunning sights. And on PC, things will look even better thanks to a NVIDIA – CD PROJEKT RED technical partnership that’s bringing four immersive ray-traced effects to the game, along with performance-enhancing NVIDIA DLSS 2.0 tech, and the ability to play Cyberpunk 2077 from the day of its release on GeForce NOW.

To learn more, and to see a brand new ray-traced trailer and screenshots from Cyberpunk 2077, keep reading.

Last year, we announced the inclusion of ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077, and shared some amazing in-game screens with the tech enabled. Now, there will be four ray-traced effects in the game, further improving image quality, realism, and immersion.

Ray-Traced Diffuse Illumination - This captures sky radiance as well as emissive lighting from various surfaces, which is difficult to achieve with traditional rendering techniques. When enabled, billboards and other illuminated surfaces and objects will brighten their surroundings with naturally colored lighting, and the sun and moon will realistically illuminate Night City.

Ray-Traced Reflections - In Cyberpunk 2077, ray-traced reflections are used on all surfaces and can trace ranges for up to several kilometers, enabling realistic reflections across vast view distances. They are present on both opaque and transparent objects and surfaces to simulate the way light reflects from glossy and metal surfaces by tracing a single bounce of reflection rays against the scene.

Unlike screen space techniques that only reflect what’s on screen, ray-traced reflections incorporate the entire scene around the character and can accurately represent objects outside the camera view or facing away from the camera. In addition, ray-traced reflections have vastly improved fidelity, and don’t suffer from other immersion-harming image quality artifacts and issues seen when using screen space techniques.

Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion - Ambient occlusion is a shading and rendering technique used to calculate how exposed each point in a scene is to ambient lighting, which results in the rendering of new AO shadows that ground objects and naturally darken surfaces, objects, and other game elements. In Cyberpunk 2077, ray-traced ambient occlusion can be used with local lights to approximate local shadowing effects where shadows are missing, greatly improving the quality of the ambient occlusion effect.

Ray-Traced Shadows – Ray tracing enables developers to bring pixel-perfect shadows to games, free from the compromises and limitations of shadow maps. In Cyberpunk 2077, directional shadows from sun and moon light are added to the game, based on the strength of light, scattering of light through clouds, and other factors.

Each of these effects is powered by DirectX 12 Ultimate’s DXR Raytracing API, and are optimized for GeForce RTX graphics GPUs and their dedicated ray tracing cores.

Powered by dedicated AI processors on GeForce RTX GPUs called tensor cores, NVIDIA DLSS 2.0 is a deep learning neural network that boosts frame rates while generating beautiful, crisp game images. It gives gamers the performance headroom to maximize ray tracing settings and increase output resolutions.

This critically acclaimed technology is already in several games, and we’re pleased to announce that it will also be available in Cyberpunk 2077.

GeForce NOW is NVIDIA's game streaming service that delivers real-time gameplay from world-class NVIDIA GPUs in the cloud. Playing PC games on GeForce NOW provides members with instant access, and the latest Game Ready Drivers for the best performance. Since you’re playing on high-performance GPUs in the cloud, even gamers on low-powered hardware can now play at amazing levels of fidelity.

Using the GeForce NOW app on PC, Mac, SHIELD TV, and Android devices, gamers can play their favorite PC titles already purchased from popular digital stores like Steam, Epic Games Store and Uplay. And because these are real PC games, GeForce NOW members experience their titles the way you intended, with and against millions of other PC players, at 1080p 60 FPS.

When Cyberpunk 2077 launches later this year, it will be available on GeForce NOW, with support for ray-tracing effects and DLSS 2.0. So even if you’re playing on an old PC, a Mac, or an Android device, you can experience Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p 60 FPS.

For further details about GeForce NOW, head here, and stay tuned to the GeForce NOW social pages to learn about other new games coming to the service.

We’ll have much more to say and show about Cyberpunk 2077 in the coming months, so stay locked to GeForce.com for all the details.