Cyberpunk 2077 gets ray tracing courtesy of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX GPUs

Image credit: CD Projekt Red / Nvidia

Cyberpunk 2077 will support ray tracing on GeForce RTX graphics cards, with CD Projekt Red announcing a partnership with Nvidia at E3 2019 to juice up the visuals of the much-anticipated game.

So those who have bought a GeForce RTX card will be able to enjoy realistic lighting and other ray tracing bells and whistles – and maybe even other GPUs, theoretically, although the dedicated RT cores will doubtless be needed to ensure the game runs smoothly.

Nvidia also furnished us with a couple of screenshots to show off what we can expect from ray tracing (at 4K resolution) in Cyberpunk 2077, which you can cast your eye over on this page.

We recently commented that what we saw recently at E3 in terms of Cyberpunk’s graphics didn’t blow us away in quite the same way as a year ago, but these ray tracing pics look very tasty (particularly the lighting and reflections in the top image).

Image credit: CD Projekt Red / Nvidia

Image credit: CD Projekt Red / Nvidia

DLSS in the mix?

Whether or not Cyberpunk 2077 will also get DLSS support isn’t clear, but many gamers will be hopeful that this is the case, in order to help the title run smoothly on RTX GPUs if ray tracing is switched on.

DLSS can give a very substantial boost to frame rates, which could be crucial to offset any of the overheads imposed by turning on ray tracing. Indeed, it could be particularly important seeing as this game is shaping up to be a highly demanding title in terms of how taxing the graphics are, even before ray tracing is thrown into the equation.

We’ll just have to wait and see, but it would make sense for Nvidia to make the effort to also include DLSS, given how high-profile this game is. DLSS support alone could be a major driver to get people to pick up RTX graphics cards.

Cyberpunk 2077 has been building up quite the hype storm, fuelled even more of late by Keanu Reeves turning up in the game, and in person at E3.

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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).