In its continuing bid to become the next Crysis, Cyberpunk 2077 recently released the "technology preview" of its RT Overdrive mode. That language is important, because it rightly suggests that most people either can't or shouldn't try out the fully path traced rendering mode for what was already a demanding game. Do you already own one of the best graphics cards? RT Overdrive could leave you longing for an upgrade.
Well, maybe. While the fully path traced version of the game is supposed to make everything look amazing, there's a reason most of the comparisons we've seen show RT Overdrive image quality versus pure rasterization-based rendering. If you're already running RT Ultra settings, the improvements aren't nearly as noticeable — they're still there, but it turns out hybrid rendering does a pretty good job of capturing most of the benefits of ray tracing without having to cast 635 rays per pixel (on average, according to Nvidia).
This is a tour de force for Nvidia's RTX hardware, including the beefed-up ray tracing cores, Shader Execution Reordering, Opacity Micro-Maps, and DLSS 3 Frame Generation. Maybe in two more generations of hardware, this is the sort of rendering we'll use in future state-of-the-art games. But that last item, in particular, deserves a bit more investigation.
As I've stated on several occasions, Frame Generation doesn't feel nearly as fast as the inflated numbers in charts might lead you to believe. You can see a full breakdown of five games with DLSS 3 support in our RTX 4070 review, but my take is that a 50% increase in frames to screen via Frame Generation feels more like a 10–20 percent improvement in performance. It will look better to someone looking over your shoulder watching you play than it feels, though, so maybe it's great for streamers?
But don't be concerned about some of those proprietary technologies limiting access to RT Overdrive mode. For better or worse, you can give path tracing a shot on everything from the original RTX 20-series up through the 40-series, as well as AMD's RX 6000- and 7000-series GPUs and Intel's Arc GPUs. Thankfully, Cyberpunk 2077 also has support for FSR 2.1 and XeSS upscaling algorithms, so there's still a chance that non-Nvidia cards will manage playable framerates.
And that's what we set out to determine: Just how well can the various graphics cards run RT Overdrive mode, and how much upscaling will you need to hit playable framerates?
