CD PROJEKT RED's Cyberpunk 2077 is a highly advanced game that uses various ray tracing techniques to create its neon-lit environments and vast Night City visuals with incredible detail. The latest update for Cyberpunk 2077 features the technology preview of the Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode, which enhances the game's visuals with full ray tracing, also known as path tracing. Full ray tracing is a technique that accurately simulates light throughout an entire scene, creating graphics that are indistinguishable from reality. However, real-time video game full ray tracing was impossible until the arrival of GeForce RTX GPUs with RT Cores and NVIDIA DLSS, which provide AI-powered acceleration. The technology preview for Cyberpunk 2077's Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode is a sneak peek into the future of full ray tracing, and NVIDIA is working with CD PROJEKT RED on further enhancements, bug fixes, and performance optimizations. One of the most significant additions in the technology preview of Cyberpunk 2077's Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode is NVIDIA RTX Direct Illumination (RTXDI), a free SDK that enables developers to replicate the appearance of light in scenes with numerous light sources. With RTXDI, thousands of objects can emit ray-traced light, including neon signs, street lamps, LED billboards, car headlights, and other sources of light in Cyberpunk 2077. With full ray tracing and RTXDI, practically all light sources in Cyberpunk 2077 cast physically correct soft shadows, creating enhanced shadowing with better depth, detail, and realism. The game features a full day-night cycle, and to upgrade indirect lighting from all emissive sources, including the sun and moon, Global Illumination (GI) needed to be path traced. Rendering techniques including Screen Space Reflections, Screen Space Ambient Occlusion, and the existing GI solutions were replaced by a single unified algorithm that delivers more accurate lighting of scenes and objects. With the Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode enabled, natural colored lighting bounces multiple times throughout Cyberpunk 2077's world, creating more realistic indirect lighting and occlusion. Reflections now incorporate bounced detail, too, and are rendered at full resolution, accentuating the cyberpunk aesthetic and further heightening immersion. Combined, the full ray tracing of direct and global illumination give gamers the most advanced real-time lighting seen to date in gaming, and a preview of how all games will look in the future. To bring these effects to life at performant frame rates, CD PROJEKT RED and NVIDIA have worked together to introduce new optimizations for this fully ray-traced pipeline. NVIDIA Shader Execution Reordering (SER) helps GPUs with executing incoherent workloads, boosting performance, NVIDIA Real-Time Denoisers (NRD) have been leveraged to further improve performance and image quality, and drivers have been specially tuned to optimize frame rates. Together with NVIDIA DLSS 3, the performance multiplier, these technologies, tweaks, and optimizations enable GeForce RTX 40 Series gamers to play Cyberpunk 2077 fully ray-traced with maximum performance. Those without a game-ready device can also experience Cyberpunk 2077 with DLSS 3 and full ray tracing in the new Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode by streaming it from the cloud with a GeForce NOW Ultimate membership, which gives you the power of a GeForce RTX 4080-class PC in the cloud. For the best experience with Cyberpunk 2077's new fully ray traced mode, download the latest Game Ready Drivers for your PC or laptop.