Cyberpunk 2077 RT Overdrive with path tracing effects will really require a very powerful PC. But not necessarily with GeForce RTX 40 graphics cards.

In a recent interview, experts from Nvidia and CD Project RED explicitly stated that gamers will need a powerful computer. True, they did not give any examples. But one of Nvidia’s engineers said that one of the modern cards in the RTX 40 line is a must.

However, as it turned out, this is more of a wish than a requirement. It is due to the support of these cards DLSS 3, which should allow a significant increase in performance, which will significantly decrease after the activation of those same effects. As we know, DLSS 3 is capable of increasing performance by several times.

However, technically Cyberpunk 2077 RT Overdrive won’t require the latest Nvidia cards. The path tracing technology itself in this game will be independent of the hardware. That is, both older Nvidia adapters and AMD cards will do. True, whether they will cope with such a load is still completely unclear.

A rather interesting video appeared on the Testing Games page on YouTube comparing four Nvidia video cards of the same level, but different generations – GeForce GTX 1070 Ti from 2017, GeForce RTX 2070 Super (2019), GeForce RTX 3070 Ti (2021) and GeForce RTX 4070 Ti (2023).

The 10-minute video clearly demonstrates how the performance of Nvidia’s upper-midrange 3D accelerators has changed from generation to generation using the example of 8 games: Cyberpunk 2077, Resident Evil 4, Forza Horizon 5, Red Dead Redemption 2, Hogwarts Legacy, Spider-Man, The Witcher 3 and Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Naturally, the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti has the best result, but it can be clearly seen that it is about 3-4 times faster than the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti (based on the FPS level) and about 60% faster than the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti. If the performance increase occurred without increasing the cost of video cards, it would be generally great, but the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti is 33% more expensive than its predecessor. In other words, the increase in performance still covers the difference in price.

Nvidia has released the Path Tracing SDK. This is a set of tools for developers to integrate path tracing technology into games.

Path tracing is a variant of ray tracing and has only been implemented in two games so far: Quake RTX or Portal RTX. The latter, thanks to these effects, has become too tough even for modern video cards, so it’s hard to say how much gamers need such technologies.

Nvidia itself notes two options for using the new technology:

• Create a reference path tracer to ensure game lighting during production matches reality, speeding up the iteration process.
• Create high-quality photo modes for RT-enabled GPUs or ultra-high-quality real-time modes that take advantage of the Ada Lovelace architecture

That is, so far even Nvidia itself does not offer to integrate effects directly into games, offering them for photo modes or for testing during game development. However, Cyberpunk 2077 will soon receive an update with path tracing, so everything will become clearer.