Nvidia announced the Ray Tracing Overdrive mode along with DLSS 3 for Cyberpunk 2077 last year and yesterday it gave us a preview of how the new Ray Tracing technique will affect the game visually as well as on performance level.
Nvidia uploaded a video recently where it shows a few examples of how the Overdrive mode changes the visual quality of the game but when the actual gameplay footage is shown in action, the game actually suffers so badly in the native resolution that in some instances it can’t even reach 20 fps. The best it could go is 30+ fps which is of course horrible.
Even though the game settings were put on ultra at 4K resolution, given that the system was using an RTX 4090, it looks like the RT Overdrive is not practical without DLSS 3.
Only when DLSS 3 was turned on, the game started running with 100+fps because DLSS introduces the frame generation technique which introduces fake frames in between the original ones.
This means that if you were to run an RT overdrive-supported game in the future, you would require a higher-end RTX 30 or 40 series GPU and the max you could go without the help of DLSS is 1080p resolution. Acknowledging the fact that playing on 1440p will require you to turn on DLSS 3, you would need an RTX 4070 or higher.
RT overdrive pipeline
This is because RT overdrive completely changes how real-time ray tracing works in games. Previous RT mode only addressed ray-traced shadows, reflections, and global illuminations for a small number of light sources but the Overdrive mode utilizes the light properties from a virtually unlimited number of emissive sources that result in more realistic reflections and shadows.
