Cyberpunk 2077 gets new ray tracing trailer and updated PC requirements
Time to reflect.
Earlier this week brought first footage of Cyberpunk 2077 running on consoles, and now there's new footage of developer CD Projekt's open-world RPG on running on PC with all the settings cranked right up, as seen on Nvidia's RTX 30-series GPUs - which means ray tracing all over the shop. And if you're curious to know what sort of PC you'll need to even come close to these visuals, there's an updated list of PC requirements to peruse.
If it's eye candy you want, though, the Nvidia-branded video is the place to be, with three of CD Projekt's developers - Marcin Gollent, Jakub Knapik, and Miles Tost - talking through the boost Night City's atmosphere receives thanks to the likes of ray traced reflections, diffuse illumination, ambient occlusion and shadows, and DLSS.
The end result, to my eyes at least, looks breathtaking at times, whether in the striking contrast between the dusty, sunbleached tones of Night City by day and the vibrant chaos of colour after sundown, or the blaze of reflective surfaces seen when the rain begins to fall.
As to the hardware you'll need to achieve all that extra ray traced bedazzlement, Nvidia says an RTX 2060 can do the business at 1920x1080 using the Medium Ray Tracing Preset with DLSS - although there's no word on target frame rates for that.
Moving up, Nvidia suggests an RTX 3070 or RTX 2080 Ti in order to crank Cyberpunk 2077's ray tracing and rasterising settings to Ultra at 2560x1440 with DLSS, while the RTX 3080 and 3090 can do the same at 4K and beyond. A more detailed breakdown of Cyberpunk's hardware requirements, from minus to ultra with ray tracing off and on across a range of GPU manufacturers, can be found in the image above. It's worth noting that once again there's no word on the frame rate these specs are targeting.
Today's update arrives with less than three weeks to go until Cyberpunk 2077's long-awaited release on 10th December, and follows yesterday's news dump, which brought, among other things, soundtrack details and an unexpectedly informative new five-minute trailer.