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 19th, 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.
GeForce RTX-Powered Ray Tracing
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.
Read the rest at Nvidia
