‘Cyberpunk 2077’ is getting a path-tracing 'Overdrive Mode' in April

Nvidia wants game developers to remember that ray tracing isn’t the end of the line. A new Cyberpunk 2077 technology preview (“Overdrive Mode”) supports path tracing, the next goalpost to make games look even prettier and keep you buying expensive new GPUs. The two-year-old game joins Minecraft, Portal and Quake II — titles with relatively primitive graphics — in supporting the technology. In addition, Nvidia announced the availability of a developer kit to pave the way for the next generation of bleeding-edge graphics.

While ray tracing follows a single beam of light across a virtual scene, path tracing follows the light as it bounces around an environment, more realistically mimicking how it works in the physical world. It determines how nearby surfaces reflect or absorb the light, producing physically accurate soft shadows that more easily convince our brains that we’re viewing a natural, real-life scene. And humans perceiving graphics as more realistic is (naturally) an advancement the gaming industry will pursue without hesitation. Hollywood has used path tracing for decades, but it was a slow and expensive process that couldn’t work on consumer gear or in anything close to real-time.