Cyberpunk 2077’s Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode goes live for PC today

A new sheen hits Night City today

A brand-new look for Night City is hitting PC today. Patch 1.62 for Cyberpunk 2077 is rolling out on PC today, with the tech preview for Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode arriving as part of it.

This new ray-tracing mode is a hefty bit of tech. It uses fully ray-traced, or path-traced, rendering in partnership with NVIDIA. CD Projekt Red acknowledges that it’s early-on, and so it’s characterizing this new mode of visuals as a Technology Preview. Basically, if things get weird, it’s still a work-in-progress, and CDPR plans to keep working on this mode in the future.

Keep in mind that this specific view is currently supported for a certain subset of graphics cards. The Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode-enabled NVIDIA cards for Cyberpunk 2077 are the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 Series, from 4070 Ti and up, as well as the 3090. The latter will be limited to 1080p / 30 FPS. The mode will also be set to “off” by default. Basically, it’s a super-high-fidelity option, for those who have managed to pick up one of the newest cards to hit the market.

To get an idea of just what it looks like, Digital Foundry has a tour of Night City using the new setting and, well, it looks really good! The real-time path tracing looks real good.

Take a picture

While you may not be able to move around in real-time with the Cyberpunk 2077 Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode enabled, there’s still a way to get some of this fidelity for yourself. For ray-tracing-capable cards that have at least 8GB of VRAM, you can render path-traced screenshots in Photo Mode. So while you won’t get the in-motion effect, you can still get some gorgeous screenshots.

Other updates in today’s patch include support for NVIDIA DLAA and Intel Xe Super Sampling 1.1, as well as improvements to the Benchmark tool.

Despite the initial technical fumbles on PS4 and Xbox One, Cyberpunk 2077 has been a pretty gorgeous game to play on a higher-end PC. With more features arriving, it’s really making Cyberpunk 2077 feel like a good medium for showing off your brand-new hardware. Plus, who doesn’t love the prospect of Keanu in overdriven ray-tracing?

If you’re not someone running the latest hardware though, there’s still some Cyberpunk in your future. The Cyberpunk 2077 expansion Phantom Liberty is expected to arrive sometime this year.