Cyberpunk 2077’s Path Tracing Update | Hacker News Reader

Cyberpunk 2077’s Path Tracing Update

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246 pointsgautamcgoel185 comments

Playing Cyberpunk Path Tracing on a friend's 4090 was incredible. Over 100fps (with all the upscaling/framegen trickery). The visual jump is significant enough that I find it worth to power through the 40-60fps I get on my 3090 (although I often disable it for combat sections).

As soon as the average gaming PC and console has the power of a 4080/4090, rasterization is dead.

Cyberpunk path tracing is the first time I felt there was a true graphical leap since Crysis from 15 years ago. Its obvious, even from youtube videos, how drastic the difference is. In contrast, the previous ray tracing comparison videos of Cyberpunk did not move me at all.

I bought a 4090 based PC last week, this is the future for video games. It also helps 4090 is dual use for AI, its like 20x faster for stable diffusion than a RTX2000s card.

I just got (as a trade from a client) a NiB 3090Ti. I haven't opened it yet. Is the 4090 really that much better? Honest question.

Although I do game, I'm mostly interested in AI work. My current baseline 3080 has been just fine, although to be fair I haven't yet experienced path tracing.

You would be best to look up reviews comparing them for your needs. For my needs the 4090 cuts ray tracing rendering times in half for what I do in Blender compared to the 3090 I have right now. I can't justify buying a 4090 right now so I will get the speed upgrade in a couple years.

In my opinion. No. Watch comparison videos as well, you can barely tell the difference.

For something like CP77 with path tracing: yes.

The extra horsepower + DLSS frame generation will give you around double the FPS.

For AI training 4090 is more efficient by quite a lot. Trade for a 4090 if you have the money for it and a good enough rig. Otherwise the 24GB VRAM of a 3090 is good and having more system RAM/disk helps more instead of a 4090.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/hpc/nvidia-rtx4090-ml-ai-a...

https://lambdalabs.com/blog/nvidia-rtx-4090-vs-rtx-3090-deep...

Something others haven't mentioned is the power consumption. On one hand, the stock 450W TDP is even higher than 3090's 350W. On the other, the 4090 barely loses any performance when you limit it to 70% (315W)

The big upside to the 40 series is DLSS 3 with frame generation. It is a wild tech that makes it possible to do things like path tracing in 4k. Not because the GPU is faster but because the AI adds smoothness.

None of that has real meaning for AI. But the 4090 is just straight up 40% faster as well.

To be honest, I'm not a fan of the path tracing in Cyberpunk. It might be more technically accurate, but it feels less artistically accurate because artists didn't make the original game with path tracing in mind. Maybe a future update can blend the tech and artistry better. That was my first impression when I was testing various settings with my new 4090.

For me that was the new SW Battlefront, which already used PBR. The game's demo blew me away. I haven't seen this Cyberpunk update but I can't imagine it being another huge step like that.

Games don't do full raytracing like blender or maya. Their raytracing works hand to hand with rasterization.

Indeed it does. Most of the ray/path tracing happens in screen space.

While I was tempted to make the same statement/assumption, the breakdown in the article/tech-tear-down seems to show a near-completely ray traced frame with only a very, very small portion of rasterization usage. If this update is indicative of the AAA spaces rendering proclivities I would say your statement just isn’t true any longer.

I think one of the strong suits of game graphics is the results at any cost model of rendering tech, where the focus is on using whatever methods get the best results the fastest (and hopefully within frame budgets) wins out. Since the advent of polygon rendering rasterization has been the best solution for attempts at realism (be that hyper- or photo- realism). However, rasterization and the rendering ‘shortcuts’ used to achieve certain effects were also useful for other styles of rendering. However, if every bit of graphics silicon is going to be designed and optimized for a physically based, photorealistic rendering result it may be difficult to bend that functionality toward some non-photorealistic usage.

I worry everything is going to end up having the same stamped out photorealistic appearance, in a similar way to the comments I’ve seen about the emerging Unreal 5 ‘look’. And that to get away from that look will require giving up a large chunk of GPU rendering horse power.

Animated movies use pathtracing and don't have that problem. You can get a lot of looks out of it, and do things like tune the color saturation of bounces.

Most games (including Cyberpunk without the path tracing mode) do use hybrid renderers indeed (so it's sprinkling ray tracing to specific parts of the traditional pipeline).

The path tracing mode mentioned here however, does "full raytracing" like blender does (outside of a few exceptions such as particles). Same with Portal RTX, Quake RTX and a few others.

It seems transparent geometry isn't being path traced (or if they are, they immediately terminate the ray on hit and applying the same trick as in their rasterizer)

No, it doesn't. Not entirely anyway. All the light transport is calculated using path tracing but primary visibility is still using the rasterizer.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-au/geforce/news/cyberpunk-2077-ray...

Nvidia's own announcement shows the path tracing overdrive mode is still tracing rays from a G-buffer, which would've been generated with the rasterizer.

I actually don't think Blender does "full ray tracing" exactly either, or at least at some point it didn't. At least to the point where you do get some rasterization artifacts, like being able to see the polygons on the edge of objects. That's probably about as good as you can get. Combined with a "nanite" like technology, it's probably not much of a problem.

As others have explained: that is becoming less and less true as time and tech marches on.

For now, we'll always have both, as too many cards/consoles can't path trace at a good enough rate. But the artist pipeline wins that come from fully path tracing lights are too good to pass up, so it's coming.

This article alone shows that basically all of the frame is path traced rather than raster. It's coming, and faster you might think.

Tbh when compared with raytracing I couldn't tell if it was better when playing. Note that I could tell it was very different but I couldn't tell if it was "better".

When watching direct comparison videos path tracing was slightly better when someone pointed out more accurate lighting details but not in a way that was noticeable if someone didn't point it out.

What I found works for path tracing is objects that don't have strong textures or bump mapping. I've tried this when writing my own path tracer in a programming project (not cyberpunk) for simple monochrome spheres. Then in that case it makes it look very real, but in something as visually detailed as cyberpunk it's barely noticeable.

I also think the lighting in cyberpunk is too urban and neon. It's not something our eyes evolved to interprete with extreme fidelity so our brains cant really see the difference. I think the effect is much more noticeable in environments with fewer light sources and light sources that aren't neon. For this reason I suspect red dead redemption 2 would benefit much more from path tracing.

That's just my opinion. I have a 3090.

To be fair, the fact that I worked in game development for a while makes the typical rasterization inaccuracies stick out like a sore thumb to me. Kind of like once you see it, you can't unsee it.

And there's also a bit of knowing where to look at, what kind of scenes and weather types benefit the most, and so on. If you have someone point out the differences, on specific scenes, even the most casual observer will notice the huge improvements[1]. However if you boot up a random scene, it may look very similar.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-ORt8313Og

Screen space reflections that are clipped depending on what is directly visible are at the top of my "hard to unsee" list.

I wonder why there's no option to render a bit outside the screen just to make these artifacts disappear. Cheaper than RT, and would provide for me the most noticeable improvement of RT

Works for this one specific case of when screen space reflections fall short. IMO fishing rods / planes make for much more distracting visual issues.

> IMO fishing rods / planes make for much more distracting visual issues.

What exactly are you referring to? I searched for it and all I got was stuff about actual fishing rods and some Minecraft and WoW guides...

Sorry, just seeing this now

Try to picture you flying a plane in a game. You're over a lake and your plane is occluding a mountain in the distance.

With SSR, those bits of the mountain your plane is blocking won't be rendered in the reflection.

Same with a fishing rod. They're tall and block a lot of things in the distance, thus breaking SSR.

Pay attention to the reflection in the water here when Sonic casts the rod (time-stamped): https://youtube.com/watch?v=IaPMkpDOFng&t=42s

Since it doesn't make sense to have a hole in a reflection when there's not actually a hole in the object, the reflection just stops when something occludes the object being reflected.

I guess if you do that you're not too far from planar reflections in terms of cost, which would be better as well since they don't suffer from occlusion artifacts.

Please tell me Cyberpunk lets you disable or at least turn down the bloom.

In some scenes, the bloom just removes all detail and makes parts of the scene look like a blurry mess.

Yes, bloom and motion blur are disablable in settings.

Motion blur is fine when done right.

Fortnite, for example, does it right. I remember watching a character dance and thinking "This is so god damn smooth, why does it look so smooth?" and then I noticed the motion blur. When done right, it's subtle and you don't even notice it unless you're looking for it.

Motion blur is an accurate rendition of how humans see things. Your eyes are not fast enough to take instantaneous pictures of fast moving objects. Instead when an object moves fast on an interval too fast for us to perceive we see everything that object did on that interval in the form of a "motion blur"

Games that render frames don't actually replicate this because the object is rendered on discreet instances. Thus your eye is not able to properly capture the "motion blur" from a set of stop motion images.

To fix this, games must use artificial motion blur to replicate what the eyes see. Disabling motion blur is a mistake it is required for fidelity.

The problem with motion blur is if it's done for objects moving too slowly. Then it becomes noticeable because if your eyes are fast enough to capture the object without blur then adding blur becomes noticeable.

I think it's three things:

1. Blur on slow objects, as you mentioned. Something moving 5 pixels per frame probably shouldn't have any blur applied.

2. Blur exceeding the distance moved per frame. If an object moves 20 pixels between frames, the blur should be less than 20 pixels wide. Ideally, I'd even argue that the blur width should be half the movement between frames. The example above of something moving only 5 pixels per frame probably shouldn't have any blur applied.

3. Blur on objects that are not moving relative to the camera. In a racing game being played with the camera above and behind the car, yes, the scenery should be blurred, but your car and the car right next to you that is driving the same speed as you should not be blurred. Though I suppose this is really just a special/specific case of problem 2 mentioned above.

Of course, there's one problem with all of this: the video game camera is supposed to represent your eyes staring strictly in one direction. When your eyes follow an object, the object does not blur, but everything else you see does. This means that if you're tracking an object on your screen with your eyes, that object should not be blurred. Unfortunately, this is not possible for games to do, because they don't know where your gaze is actually directed.

Finally, I can't close out this comment without mentioning the greatest offender when it comes to doing motion blur wrong: simply blending each frame with the previous one. There was an N64 game that did this, and my god it's horrible.

At minimum, everything becomes significantly darker. Without a total redesign of set lighting with ray tracing in mind, it looks like a lot of areas would be barely playable.

I couldn't disagree more. I agree that ray traced cyberpunk doesn't really look better, except for surface reflections. But path tracing is an incredible leap. It makes everything pop so much. No longer does the game have this "fullbright" quality to it. With that I mean textures that look like they are fully illuminated,

Sometimes things pop too much with path tracing! I like some of the better ambient lighting within shadows, and I agree about your "fullbright" thing. I always felt they could have just fixed the materials there though. But bright neon lights (which are everywhere) give off too much bloom with path tracing. The lights themselves feel too hazy and unrealistic, despite them being more technically real. I think lights that you're looking at directly need to be tuned for path tracing purposes better. I felt there's areas at night where path tracing was ruining the atmosphere created by artists without path tracing in mind.

> When watching direct comparison videos

Watch the digital foundry videos. If you watched the GamersNexus ones they are notorious raytracing haters and picked worst case scenes to demo path tracing for most of their videos (where the faked lighting looked as close to PT as possible).

We also have to consider that the art and visual design for this game would have been done with primarily Rasterization and traditional RT in mind. Adding the path tracing may or may not generate the most aesthetic look as it was not optimized for that in the first place.

Real benefit is streamlining production. Sure, some scenes benefit from path tracing more than others, when it matters, it's very noticable. But IMO consistently noticable image quality improvements occures when light bounces start stacking up, more than the 1-2 bounces real time currently runs on, which is preproduction tier quality for ray/path traced visualization. Artists/traditional rendering methods can fake the feel of 1-2 bounces pretty close, but once you crank up the rays and materials, the difference gets staggering.

I think you've hit on the key relevance of path tracing (and similar advances). It's not that it necessarily brings a huge improvement over the current state of the art when comparing a hand-tweaked "Hero Scene." Skilled game artists can already tune such a scene to look amazing anyway. The difference is things like path tracing can offer similar fidelity without specific artist labor.

DLSS is a big part of the magic here. Ordinary 1 ray per pixel would be barely enough, let alone 1 ray per 2/4 pixels. We're really got the "trickery" to thank as without it we'd be taking a large step back in terms of detail.

Raster has decades of trickery built in. PT will catch up.

The main "trickery" comes before DLSS, namely via the heavy use of a denoiser. This reduces the required ray count to a small fraction, while still yielding acceptable quality.

I think the big gain came from "ReSTIR". The previous games released with RT "remasters" like Quake 2 have only a few lights that need to be traced per frame. ReSTIR apparently can optimize how rays are traced and allows for far more light sources to be visible.

This is where the performance gain for the 100s of lights Cyberpunk might have in a single frame comes from.

https://research.nvidia.com/publication/2021-06_restir-gi-pa...

There is a "Digital Foundry" video which mentioned it.

> As soon as the average gaming PC and console has the power of a 4080/4090, rasterization is dead.

Yeah I think so too, but I do think that is a long way away. At least 5, maybe more, years. Because the sheer install base of non-path-tracing cards means a developer is silly to ignore it, and sadly the state of the GPU market means that that install base is going to stay as-is for quite a while, I think.

I hope I'm wrong: path tracing with proper dev tooling around it means we get near-perfect lighting in our games, with less development and artist time needed to achieve it. It'll be an amazing day once it's path-tracing-only.

This is still rasterized, though. They're just leveraging RT hardware for high-fidelity shading.

Is it? I thought they rendered everything with ray tracing.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-au/geforce/news/cyberpunk-2077-ray...

The rasterizer is used to trace the primary rays to generate a G-buffer like any other deferred renderer that's been in use for decades by this point. What's unique is that all light transport is solved with path tracing.

>As soon as the average gaming PC... has the power of a 4080/4090

So, a decade from now

>As soon as the average gaming PC and console has the power of a 4080/4090

Ah, more like 15 years.

Then, shortly after that, the mainstream won't be client compute, but cloud compute and game streaming. Although, I wonder if 20 years to build out full fiber for almost everyone in rich countries is realistic. I might be over optimistic here, actually. Maybe 30 for mainstream game streaming.

I'm willing to bet that next gen consoles will at least match RTX 4090 PT performance. It will not take 15 years, it will take 4-5.

Even if you have path tracing, the "primary" rendering (ie seen triangles) will almost surely use classic rasterization because it's simply so much faster still w/o any real downsides.

Secondary rays (GI, non-planaer reflections) though are quite hacky to accomplish with rasterization and benefits immensly more from the availability of raytracing extensions where your "only" problem is that you can't sample as much as you'd like so you need to converge a solution instead.

It’s so crazy how this game continues to get significantly better and better but since they botched the release, these updates go mostly ignored

I bought it recently at half the launch price, played through this (now) flawlessly working game, and had a blast. It must suck to be a games publisher/developer, and have all of your users incentivized to wait.

Can't blame the users when the publisher screwed up the launch. Publishers have normalized releasing broken games on launch day instead of pushing back launches to finish games. That's 100% in the publisher.

The game was published by CD Projekt S. A., and developed by its own subsidiary, CD Projekt Red. The two companies are more closely linked than any other publisher-developer subsidiary pair. The game was hyped up for almost a decade, with a trailer released in 2012, barely after The Witcher 2, and well before The Witcher 3 was released.

CP2077 just spent far too much money on marketing and not enough on actually developing the game. Compared to TW3, CP2077 feels empty; the story was obviously rushed, and they had to change a lot to fit in Johnny Silverhand and Keanu Reeves. There are a lot of empty spots, the story is still rather... pointless, and there's honestly nothing to do. The game has been patched, but these have been mostly to do with bugs, balancing, graphics, and performance. It is still fundamentally broken, in my opinion, and still offers very few of the promises initially made by CDPR.

Sure - blame the publisher or the developer - I don't care which one. But it isn't the public's fault for having bad thoughts about a game with seriously borked launch. Devs/Publishers should know that has a permanent impact on perception of the game, and perception of the studio.

For the record, I'm agreeing with you; the hype and marketing for CP 2077 was the most intensive and pervasive campaign I have seen for a video game in a long time.

The game failed to deliver on a lot of counts, and this is coming from someone who suffered through Witcher 3 at launch, running at 40 FPS on a tiny notebook with a GTX 860M. Even through these issues, that game was fun. CP 2077 just... wasn't.

Yet something like no man's sky happened. That couldn't have imagined a worse launch, and really they deserved it.

But, they really did regain the trust of the public by adding all that was promised and more. For free. In my personal view they more than redeemed themselves. I still find it a bit boring but that's to be expected with so much RNG/Autogen. It's inherent to the type of game. But all the initial shortcuts taken have been fixed.

CP2077 never bothered to do this. I love the game and the story but some parts feel ridiculously hollow and short. Like the 3 starter paths. There's so little unique content in them that I'm sure they were so heavily cut that the only reason they were kept at all is that they had already been promised.

I really wish stuff like this would have been filled in after release.

The subway system someone else mentioned is another example. The fast travel option we got feels like a cop out.

I watched the project manager (?) of no man's sky outright lie in interviews about it for so long I don't care that they fixed it. He lied over and over and over again. I wouldnt buy anything he's associated with. It helps that its just another survival resource gathering game and I just dont care about it.

CP2077 looked like something I'd enjoy. It definitely needs more content.

Imho Eldenring is proof that if you deliver a good product, people are willing to shell out good money for it.

Similar case for No Man's Sky.

I've been really enjoying Fallout 76, although for whatever reason it seems to run much better on PC than PS5 (even on a 1660S)

Is it playable at this point? My last attempt was ~6 months ago, after many patches had been released and it was supposedly more ready than it had been before.

I eventually gave up after I’d keep getting random crashes that would force me to start the current quest over.

Maybe my issue was something less common, but I still have yet to experience the game that I’ve been more excited about than almost any other for quite a few years.

Definitely playable. I play mine on a bootcamped MacBook 16” and it runs really well @ 1080p

I had a similar experience playing it a few months ago—I bought it on steam so it had all the patches, but I got stuck on this one mission where it would refuse to spawn the entrance to the next part of the quest. I spent a few hours googling trying to figure out what was going on, and then I gave up. It’s such a beautiful game, and has a lot of potential, but it is definitely not as stable as any other major AAA game I’ve played in the last 10 years. I would also get random crashes if I enabled raytracing (despite having an RTX card).

Is this in the Imperial Mall quest in Pacifica? Have to hack into a van or something, then talk to some Netwatch guy? A quest trigger bugged there for me as well last week, there was a door that should be open that wasn't, had to reload an earlier autosave and replay for it to trigger properly.

Other than that one large bug, the game has been great, little bit of jank but no worse than say, Skyrim without the community bug patch. I only purchased it in the last steam sale so missed all the rough stuff.

I think it might have been that? It was in one of the first missions. I agree though on your other points--my experience playing the game up until that point was quite good, hence why I spent hours trying to get past the issue.

The game is still an empty husk.

It is empty in a lot of ways, but filled with detail that many other games don't have in others. I particularly dislike how ridiculous the driving physics are, but the character customization and vast variety of different upgrades and mods is pretty cool.

But now it's an empty husk with prettier visuals!

Just finished a full play through nearly bug free. Had one hard crash where I lost 2 minutes of playtime and the quest where you get to choose to kill the killer in the police escort under the bridge (that leads to the cult quest according to the internet) was hard glitched with no way to complete the quest.

Playing on an XBox Series S.

On high end hardware it was always playable for me. It just wasn't fun. Police would spawn right next to you if you messed up, for example.

> Police would spawn right next to you if you messed up, for example.

I think that has been patched as of 1.2. The patch notes include:

> The game's infamously speedy police department have been told to take a chill pill, with an increase to their spawn radius for when a player commits a crime. Hopefully this means a whole squad will no longer appear behind your back.

And 1.21 had:

> It makes a long list of fixes, including for an issue where, after the player commits a crime on the roof of a building, NCPD officers would spawn behind the player's back.

It's been playable on next (aka current) gen hardware for a while now. So PS5, Xbox series X, or a powerful PC can handle the game fine. I played after patch 1.5, which contained a lot of bug fixes, and the game was ok. Still minor glitches here and there, but nothing game breaking.

Did you play on console? I started the game at launch day and didn't experience any game breaking issues, don't remember any crashes either.

I’m playing on a higher end gaming PC.

Early on, the crashes were constant. Couldn’t get past the intro.

Eventually they became more occasional, but not until a few patches after the first “major” patch they released.

I’ll have to give this another try.

I played Cyberpunk on a high end gaming PC about a month after launch and it played just fine. There's apparently something about your particular configuration the game doesn't like.

I played about 45 hours of 2077 in September-October last year (so awhile ago, but after the majority of the big patches), before I got a concussion that I'm still struggling with, and it was rock solid and bug free for me and a really enjoyable experience — and I was playing on Linux! But everyone's mileage seems to vary.

Saw elsewhere you were on PC. I'm on a series x and it plays really well. I don't know how much time I've spent on it but it was way too much because I was getting back into a C++ project and played it whenever I had long compilations. I only had a couple of crashes and it was about 6 months ago too, so it might just depend on what systems they are fixing bugs for at a given time.

That being said, once you finish everything it really does feel empty. There's no repeatable content once the game is finished, unlike most other open world games. This is pretty unfortunate because I would sometimes just happen upon fun little notes and hiding spots. I'm sure there are tons of little details that will never be noticed because there's no drive to go out of your way and find them once all the other stuff is done.

I played a full-ish playthrough (no more quest triggers on the map at completion) at version 1.60 and didn't ever crash once. I got a freeze that I need to tab to a different window and `kill -9` it, which required restarting from the previous autosave. No crashes though.

I'm currently 40ish hours into a second playthrough (no more tertiary/secondary quest markers on the map, although I need to wait for a few more secondary quests to activate before completing the main quest line) of 1.61 and haven't had any freezes or crashes.

For the record, I highly recommend the game. It has great world building, gameplay, immersiveness, it feels alive in a way that I haven't felt about any game in a while.

I'm playing on Linux with an AMD GPU in Wayland. YMMV on Windows and/or nvidia and/or X.org.

I played it from day one on hardware which was barely matching the minimum specs. Never had any game breaking bugs and it usually only crashed during long sessions, if at all.

Software stacks nowadays are such massive pieces of garbage that it is kind of surprising things are not falling apart repeatedly. Which also means having the "right" parts and pieces together you actually may see this happening, unfortunately.

The guy, who never played the game.

Got it on sale a few weeks ago, beat it about one week ago. Linux PC, decent hardware.

Maybe 3-5 bugs, mostly small stuff. Only saw 1 dude randomly t-pose, and another (a civilian hiding from a shootout) slowly fade/sink into the earth. Maybe one hard crash, which isn't bad compared to the issues I'd see with FNV or Skyrim. In other words, played fine.

Cool setting, and the first half of the game is amazing -- blew me away -- but the gameplay is fairly repetitive otherwise; i.e. go here, kill people, collect loot, go here kill people, collect loot, go here don't kill people (stealth mission!), but then get in a shoot-out after you steal the thing and collect loot, etc.

Skyrim and FNV felt like you had more choices as to how you played, while GTA V had a lot more to do, like the silly Yoga minigames, or stock manipulation, or submarines and aircraft, etc. I played a bit of Shadowrun and CP2020 on the tabletop and I remember the old CP2020 Rulebook talking about "style over substance" and that's kinda how the game plays.

I'd grumble if I had paid full-price but am pretty satisfied at half, and I'd consider the DLC as long as it wasn't buggy as hell and got alright reviews.

They yanked a ton of features from their 48-minute demo released in 2018 to make the release date which they never bothered to add back

My biggest issue with the game at launch was that the place felt empty, like a giant city with nothing going on. Has that changed at all?

No, not really. I’ve enjoyed playing again after being let down at launch but these sort of larger/ feature type issues were never addressed. Like they couldn’t even add back in the subway system you see stations for. I think if you can accept the game for what it is, it’s worth checking out. But it will never be anything like what was promised.

I hear this criticism a lot, I imagine it is different for everyone but what do you think is missing in comparison to other games?

For me it feels alive but like a diorama. You can't really interact with much, so once you stray from quests you really haven't got much to do.

Obligatory mention to check if you have "HDD Mode" disabled, with it enabled it reduces the NPC and vehicle count and variety. The game is also huge with day/night cycles, so there are times and places that have few NPCs.

> For me it feels alive but like a diorama.

This is one of the things that Oblivion and Skyrim did really well. You're just walking around randomly in a forest, see a small cabin, go to investigate, oh hmm some notes mentions a basement, but where? Oh there's a hidden door? Wut? A giant cave system, full with backstory notes of some guys trying to revive some old monster?!

This happened to me like 15 minutes into the game, and I spent a good hour or more (lost track of time) exploring the caves and fought the monster at the end.

You'd just stumble over these non-trivial quest locations, and for me that's something I've not really felt in other games. Almost all just confine you to the narrow path.

Many many shareware 90s games would like a word with you.

which ones? I probably have a bunch of them on those "WAREZ" cds you could buy at trade shows.

Red Dead Redemption 2, at least single player, has this sort of vibe. you control the seasons by where you are on the main quest line; you can spend as long as you want exploring each area - multiple times over the seasons if you want. Very reminiscent of oblivion, if memory serves.

Fallout isn't quite as good as Skyrim was at it, but that is what I loved from those games too.

Cyberpunk actually has a lot of good environmental storytelling moments just wandering the city, but they don't capitalize and turn them into self driven exploration, the stories don't go anywhere.

An example might be the homeless thief living under the underpass near North Oak, there are two story beats, you find the first note suggesting where they live, then you find the spot and there is a second note, and that's it.

> Cyberpunk actually has a lot of good environmental storytelling moments just wandering the city, but they don't capitalize and turn them into self driven exploration, the stories don't go anywhere.

One day I see GPT or the like running with this. Dream up a couple themes for the game, region, NPCs, all of which are unique to your game, and then let the AI take you for a ride based on those. Kinda like a DM of a D&D game running with a fun idea that wasn't planned but could be cool.

> You'd just stumble over these non-trivial quest locations, and for me that's something I've not really felt in other games. Almost all just confine you to the narrow path.

It seems to be a casualty of the ever increasing time and expense needed to create a modern AAA game. Bethesda themselves are clearly suffering from this trap; their games are taking longer and longer to get released and get further “dumbed down” in each new title. I suspect this is one of the bigger contributing reasons for all the AAA studios going “games as a service”.

One bright spot: the, uh, upcoming Zelda title will absolutely scratch some of this itch. Somebody at Big N really took that “huge beautiful world, but mostly empty” BotW criticism to heart and sunk six years into addressing it. It’s honestly unbelievable.

I find it difficult to compare Oblivion or Skyrim to CP2077. I mean look even at the cities in Skyrim: It is a couple houses, maybe a palace, sewers and you are done. A single megabuilding in CP2077 houses more people than either game has in its entirety if you think about it. Also, I find it absolutely funny how people think "oh there is a door I want to go through it!" Then you notice that these doors are something like maintenance access doors, which are in the real world accessible and open to everyone ... not. So why would anyone with half a brain expect to go through every single door like that? That is just unrealistic on multiple levels.

Now, about detail ... for example, you have various people playing guitar in that game and players looked at it more closely and they are really playing what you hear, i.e. it is just not random animation. The game is filled with this sort of detail that, unfortunately, quite a lot of players miss / don't recognize. Which also means a lot of work went into these things.

Fair enough. I do recall some of those encounters in CP2077. But somehow the world still felt... sterile? Unengaging? For whatever reason, it wasn't feeling I got from Oblivion and Skyrim.

I thought Zelda BoTW nailed it pretty well. Everywhere you go there's always something exciting to find.

Not really, the gangs still have no purpose but are marked as enemies. There is no persistence of any status with the gangs, theyre just vagrants that you get overpowered in killing. There is no overarching goal of doing that if you choose to do that (which the game prompts you to do).

Because the game still looks boring

As a fan of games like Deus Ex and Witcher, Cyberpunk was the best game I ever played. And it's perfectly playable now (on PC under Linux).

It is still getting onto the daily playercount leaderboard for Steam regularly, which is impressive for a single player game. I don't think it is as unpopular as people think, it has just left the games media bubble.

This could be said for many many games.

Especially given how incentivized youtubers, news (basically blogs) sites, twitter, etc are all encouraged to be negative or at least drum up controversy for clicks.

I know for me I played Cyberpunk at launch and loved it, ran into a few bugs but it was nothing show stopping for me. But I was also playing on an Xbox Series X so I know I missed out on the issues with the old consoles and PC.

Edit: Just to be clear the game had major issues, it was enough to Playstation to delist it. But the actual state of reality and what it appears to be based on youtube and similar is not the same.

I also had no showstopping issues at launch, I played on a decent spec PC. I have seen how it played on last gen consoles though, and I get why people were mad.

100% agreed on what you might call the youtube hate-sphere. So often it influences my friends and I have a really hard time convincing them to actually play things and see for themselves, instead of parroting negativity from YouTube. The gaming community has become really bad for mob mentality, and actively bullying based on bad information. It can be a very antagonistic environment.

It really is just so bad for the industry.

The number of times I will be in a conversation about a game I have played and someone will confidently say the game sucked because of XYZ. But if you ask if they ever played it, of course not. They got their opinion from YouTube.

And I get it games are not cheap (however I will argue that even shorter single player games on a cost per hour is still one of the cheapest sources of entertainment out there). It is almost as if gamers view gaming as a winner take all situations. But for some reason gamers keep contributing to it and we have sites like IGN that just keeps fanning it with their “console wars” and other crap.

> It really is just so bad for the industry.

It's like that for everything, not just games. That's why most companies are very meticulous about managing their public image (and that of their products') - they know that "shit sticks" and that a negative slant to how the public perceives them can stay with them for years, and can hurt them a lot. Games is a peculiar industry, as multi-billion companies routinely release half-baked products full of bugs, get a ton of hate for it, and still manage to be profitable.

What I find particularly interesting about games is that it is treated as an entertainment product from a marketing prospective (which obviously it is) but it is the only software that is treated this way.

We get release dates sometimes a year or 2 in advance and yet maybe internally we (software engineers not in the games industry) have some idea of a release date but we sure don't share that publicly beyond maybe a month.

You could argue that there are pieces of this in movies, particularly in CGI and animated movies like Pixar. But from what I have seen a lot of that tends to be more finalized once we have a release date in that area. Maybe even at the rendering state.

I wish more games could follow a better software development pattern but it would be really hard to change the industry now it seems like. Gamers expect it and publishers expect it.

after the netflix show it got wildly popular

the bigger issue is that a lot of guides and reviews and forum posts about issues are still from 2020 and its not even the same game

so even of people that like the game its this whole bifurcated community

Completed the game straight after it came out, fantastic game.

Think they could make a killing making it multiplayer, but doesn’t look like it’s happening.

Didn’t they announce they’re switching to UE5 for future games and not developing their own game engine further? Has that now changed?

I think they said they switched to Unreal Engine 5 for "The Witcher 4".

They hired a different company to remake the first Witcher game in UE5. I don't think a fourth one was mentioned anywhere

See https://www.gamesradar.com/the-witcher-4-unreal-engine-5/

> this game continues to get significantly better and better

Maybe the graphics and the technical side but it’s still not what it was promised. Sure I enjoyed it as a one off action game but it’s not the genre defining open world RPG they were hyping up for years. They can fix the technical problems, but “fixing” the story, characters, the quests, the world itself not gonna happen.

Having played through it and having recently realized how many more different ending there are, I found the story and characters to be genre defining. There have been story lines that have troubled me, made me think, deeply surprised me and that I enjoyed thoroughly and I'm looking forward to my next play through, probably when the official development has seized but with lots of small mods.

To be fair, I waited till it was stable enough and most the issued had been fixed (/r/patientgamer) but after that it has become the game of the decade for me that is as genredefining as half life or deus ex were.

Do these updates apply to PS4 as well?

There's no point in looking at any updates. It is my understanding that even though it was found that malicious actors had commit access during development, no source code audit was conducted. Since it can't be proven that said malicious actors didn't commit malware prior to release, it must be assumed the game contains malware and therefore cannot be safely installed or played.

> It is my understanding that even though it was found that malicious actors had commit access during development, no source code audit was conducted. Since it can't be proven that said malicious actors didn't commit malware prior to release, it must be assumed the game contains malware and therefore cannot be safely installed or played

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Source me plz.

This is not an extraordinary claim - It was widely covered in the press. Even cursory google searching should find plenty of stories - Here's one picked randomly: https://kotaku.com/cd-projekt-red-confess-hack-severity-whil...

The attackers had full access to version control servers and therefore the ability to directly modify the versioned code without going through a normal commit process, giving them effectively unrestricted commit access.

The source code for many CDPR properties was later sold by the attackers.

Loved reading this! What a fantastic dive into the update, and the visualizations are easy to grasp (also the VRAM ones reminded me of original Doom corridors). Generally impressed with XeSS given the lack of real world execution from Intel on this front, compared to the likes of DLSS v1.

Also a great overview of the general state of ray tracing, I feel similarly in that some might be placing far too much emphasis on Nvidia's perspective: that raytracing the holy grail of gaming right now, when we are forced to give up quite a lot for playable experiences.

I'm surprised XeSS is seeing adoption at all, given Intel ARC's stillborn state of affairs.

Now granted, Intel ARC is facing a chicken-egg problem so it needs someone to adopt XeSS first to hopefully drive customer sales, but even as an Intel fanboi I would tell any gamedev that adopting ARC is a waste of time and resources right now.

Doesn't XeSS work on non-Intel GPUs as well?

Yes, though it doesn't give much performance and you are better off using FSR2/other non-AI techniques like TSR.

Non-Xe cards go through a different path with much lower quality. Worse than FSR2, maybe on par with FSR1 iirc.

ARC is hardly stillborn. This may surprise you, but Intel has no issue moving GPUs. They are targeting low->mid end, which is an unpopular segment for hardcore gamers, but it is actually the largest segment.

The whole reason they didn't kill ARC to begin with is the volume + margin. Arc isn't profitable overall due to development costs, and margins aren't great, but on a per unit cost Intel is making money. Similar situation to when AMD started getting hot and heavy into console development.

Source? I don’t know anyone who would recommend Intel. There are plenty of better AMD and Nvidia cards in all of intels price points.

That's not true anymore :) The ARC A750 sits between the Radeon RX 6600 and 6650 XT. The 6600 is a bit cheaper, but significantly slower. The 6650 XT is faster, but also more expensive. When (and if) Intel improves the driver more it will definitely be the better deal.

Nvidia has no card in this price segment that is remotely worth considering.

So while the initial reviews were negative, the ARC A750 does get recommended as an option now.

But: One has to be okay with the fact that picking the ARC is a bit of a gamble, needs a processor/platform that supports resizable bar, and under Linux the card is slower than the 6600 even with rBar. So there are definitely reasons to get the AMD cards instead, but the A750 is absolutely worth considering by now.

Sources: The GN revisit, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-6sHUNBxVg ; my benchmark collection, https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/games/gpu/compare?ids%...

Yeah I checked benchmarks for the A750 when speccing out a budget gaming computer for a friend in India, and the A750 handily beats out competitor cards at that price point.

Also, the A750 or A770 handily destroy the RX 6600/6650 in path tracing! They are much more capable cards, just held back by nascent drivers, sadly.

Is there a better new card for $120 than the A380? It's better than the GeForce 1630 which is more expensive. I guess maybe one of those sketch Chinese brand Radeon 580s? Are those even new?

Nvidia actually doesn’t have anything competitive in the A750 and a770 8gb price points.

AMD’s cards lack performant ray tracing.

> I don’t know anyone who would recommend Intel.

I'd recommend them to some friends, and actually a colleague of mine got the A770 and is very happy with that (besides the relatively high idle power consumption).

In fact, if you want a lot of VRAM for relatively cheap, the A770 is your best choice, e.g., compare a list of GPUs with 16 GB or more video memory, sorted ascending by price here in Austria (includes German merchants):

https://geizhals.at/?cat=gra16_512&xf=132_16384&sort=p#produ...

  Cheapest is the Intel A770 -> 379 € (= 315.83 € without VAT)
  The cheapest after that is the RX 6800 -> 527€ (439.16 € w/o VAT)
  The cheapest that actually can also do AV1 encoding is the RX 7900 XT -> 846 € (705 € w/o VAT)

Sure, the RX 6800 packs quite a bit of additional performance (but not all features the Intel Arc's got, like AV1 encoding), but 150€ more might make it unaffordable for quite a few people, and depending on what they do with the card the A770 can be enough for a lot of midrange games (or AAA on midrange resolution/details), video processing, rendering, ...

tldr; while not a hard recommendation for all general cases, the Arc series def. has its use, especially on lower budget and especially for use cases that do well with lots of VRAM or AV1 encoding/decoding for a relative low price.

> They are targeting low->mid end, which is an unpopular segment for hardcore gamers, but it is actually the largest segment.

“Hardcore” gamers are actually an extreme minority. Most people just cannot afford high-end hardware. $150-250 was always the most popular price point, the market just gouged during the crypto rush and moved cards up market…that do not sell.

Nvidia has stacks of 4070s and 4080s in stores that they cannot move

Very true, and this is likely why most adoption is coming from Intel's partners, or studios with enough resources to do things such as implement XeSS, DLSS, and FSR for fans/testing after the fact.

They are mostly currently benefitting from the "why not" aspect, where those larger teams already tasked with implementing DLSS3 are encouraged to also add FSR2 and XeSS. For everyone else, they're likely going to rely on the engine to provide support due to the timelines required to implement all 3 forms. Of which I believe it's why FSR2 adoption has been slower than expected. Engines like Unity only natively offer FSR1.0 and DLSS. Unreal being the only outlier here with plugins for all 3 options.

So really, in a way we can sort of see how FSR2 and XeSS benefit from each other's existence rather than having DLSS leave both completely behind purely due to market pressure.

When I think of ray tracing, my mind immediately assumes that it is equivalent to path tracing, and I have been a bit disappointed by many games' raytracing implementation. My biggest qualm with games out there, is that reflections are still always screenspace. I want to be able to use a reflective surface like water, glass, or mirrors to get a glimpse of what is around a corner, or to watch behind myself. (There is the occasional exceptionally well implemented mirror or portal, but most reflections only handle static scene geometry outside the camera's field of view.)

Does Cyberpunk's path tracing finally allow this, or are the paths still limited to what is in view? Personally, I feel like proper reflections would be more useful and visually impressive for games than trying to render things as realistically as possible. I know that is a lot to ask with the current hybrid rendering approach, but I felt like ray/path tracing would address those issues from the start.

If it does work well, I will probably buy and play through it again. (Steam family sharing is a wonderful thing)

Sad to not see DLSS thrown into the upscaling test section, as I’ve seen the best quality to performance ratio running that over FSR or others.

It seems like they stuck with AMD and Intel's upscaling here because they were able to use the superior AMD debugging/instrumentation to examine what was going on in each frame. Nsight definitely provides less detail.

I maintain that cyberpunk has one of the best non-RT reflections and rendering of most AAA titles... Just a beautiful game. Too bad they didn't put more time into making the game itself outside of the campaign more fun.

Presumably the WGPs are working on rays which start close to each other in space, which causes the potential occupancy problems mentioned. I wonder if you could shuffle the rays around a bit to help occupancy at the possible expense of cache hit rate.

Why would shuffling the rays around help with occupancy? I 'd also guess that worse locality could easily obliterate any other benefits, but you never know unless you test...

I'm working off the hypothesis in the article:

> I wonder if RT work is a lot less predictable than rasterization workloads, making workload distribution harder. For example, some rays might hit a matte, opaque surface and terminate early. If one shader engine casts a batch of rays that all terminate early, it could end up with a lot less work even if it’s given the same number of rays to start with.

You would end up with shader engines working for longer on average but with more "dead lanes" then, with no real benefit, right? Sounds like more flexible scheduling would ultimately be needed.

I wonder if we can expect to be able to play Cyberpunk 2077 at 4k 144hz on the next gen of GPUs. It took me so little to get used to gaming at high frame rates and high res, it feels like a jump that took almost no time.

At this time it more looks like a money question. 4k 144hz mainstream for reasonable money? Not in this decade.

Console platforms have a lifespan of about a decade, give or take a few years. Maybe we will see 4k 60fps PT next gen, so around 2030ish.

4090 with DLSS upscaling + framegen is almost there, so next gen for sure.

One of the biggest drives (for me at least) behind 144Hz is reduced latency. Framegen obliterates that.

I just want third person...so much more enjoyable to see your character in the world, was a bit disappointed CDPR didn't include this option

esp. after they went through so much effort to model your body and clothes.

For all the hype, I don't think it looks very much better.. In many of the screenshots, I prefer the "no ray tracing" variant anyhow..

It does seem more realistic in motion.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=1K8Br6jHkcs&pp=ygURZGYgY3liZXJwd...

I feel like AMD could optimized future architectures around this (very poorly optimized) game and they'd probably have a fantastic GPU.

It runs on steamdeck

CP2077 isn't really that poorly optimized at this point. People are usually judging the performance based on the launch version on consoles (very bad, but because it was unfinished) or PC with the settings turned up.

Yeah I finished the game within the first month on a Radeon RX580 before many of the optimisations were released. Performance at low/medium was fine, not wonderful but perfectly usable so long as I didn't raise the settings too high. I saw videos of the PS4 and Xbox One performance and it was gruesome, I can completely understand why Sony pulled the PS4 version.

I think this "dumb" brute force approach to ray tracing won't have a lot of success for global illumination in the foreseeable future, it is simply to costly, and GPU price-performance progress is slow nowadays. The new Unreal Engine 5 ray tracing solution (Lumen) is a much smarter, more optimized approach based on light accumulation and SDF dummies. It doesn't require outsized hardware, although it probably can't quite match the quality of brute force ray tracing.

There's nothing brute force about getting this level of quality with just 2 samples per pixel. It is pretty magical actually, only possible thanks to ReSTIR, AI denoising, AI upsampling, AI frame generation and strong hardware acceleration for all these steps.

Lumen is very impressive, but definitely not "much smarter" than all those technologies I mentioned.

Anyway, Lumen is basically targeting PS5, while path tracing is "PS6" territory. Path tracing is without a doubt the future, basically the holy grail of rendering. Lumen an intermediate step before the HW is strong enough.

Well, Lumen must be smarter, otherwise it wouldn't run on significantly weaker hardware. Here is a SIGGRAPH talk with the technical details:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=2GYXuM10riw

https://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2022/SIGGRAPH2022-Ad...

By that logic, Doom must be smarter, otherwise it wouldn't run on significantly weaker hardware.

Well, Lumen does have lower quality, but it also uses advanced tricks, like the SDF dummies, which safe a lot of performance. It runs even on GPUs without RT hardware acceleration, in software.

> The image is rendered at a lower resolution, and then scaled up to native resolution, hopefully without noticeable artifacts or image quality degradation

That's what makes ray tracing not an attractive proposition at the moment. Once it will become usable without upscaling, then it will be interesting.

Why? DLSS Quality is virtually indistinguishable from native. No reason to not turn it on when available

I don't buy this "indistinguishable" claim. Especially in any general case. At most it would be not too annoying. It's always about paying with one quality for another.

Arguably native rendering wouldn't have antialiasing, because that would be downscaling, so DLSS would have both some disadvantages and some advantages. So the best case is better than "not too annoying", it has the potential to beat pure native rendering.

> Arguably native rendering wouldn't have antialiasing, because that would be downscaling

If you're unfamiliar with computer graphics it's unhelpful to try to nitpick and just end up being incorrect. Antialiasing is not downscaling, and less data is never going to beat more data for visual fidelity.

I said 'arguably' for a reason, not out of ignorance. Parts of the pipeline are still per-pixel, and parts are effectively rendering at a higher resolution.

> less data is never going to beat more data for visual fidelity

It has less data but better processing. That can look better sometimes.

Except it doesn't strictly have less data. It has multiple frames and other information to work with.

Frame generation techniques like TXAA and DLSS can provide superior quality to standard rasterization since they're taking advantage of extra information from previous frames, along with information that isn't fully exploited during traditional rasterization (like motion vectors and the depth buffer). DLSS goes a step further by exploiting the ML hardware on the GPU for increased throughput.

Of course if you set the internal resolution to 720p it's going to look bad, but there are cases where DLSS quite literally beats native when the internal resolution is close enough. And TXAA when implemented right is just 100% an improvement over non-TXAA in every case I've ever seen.

(I group TXAA and DLSS together because, generally speaking, they are the same sort of thing)

So it means that this temporal information can be used without upscaling to improve quality instead of mixing it with upscaling reducing it.

Bingo! God it's so frustrating when people mix the two up and end up thinking the whole world agrees with their conclusion that you can get a better image from less data, all else being equal. People still argue this all the time and it's absolutely maddening.

Agreed. It usually sounds like complete Koolaid.

Yeah, I think if you were to configure things to run DLSS with an internal resolution matching native, you would get enhanced quality in all cases. I don't know how feasible it is to do that though.

Ray tracing in this game is laughable.

There’s a portion of the city where gigantic, nuclear-sized explosions happen at night.

Its not combat, but street light reflecting the rain!

This is a recent, as in last week, graphics pipeline overhaul for raytracing. Not saying your issue won't still happen, I haven't tested it, but if your basing your impressions off of the old hybrid raytracing modes, might be worth checking the new stuff out.

I will check it out, but my experience is from within the last few days.

I think you need a 3090+ to have the right compatability, and you need to manually enable "Overdrive" raytracing mode in the settings.

I also went and tested the rain thing in the old psycho hybrid mode and yeah, that's hilarious. I have had weird "ghosting" with hybrid mode and this felt like the same thing but x100

It’s always been turboweird to me how hard the gaming press dunked on cd projekt. I assume they got marching orders because obviously, but from where?

You clearly did not play the console release. They followed the huge cohort of memes and fan anger and amplifed it, Thats what the media does

> I assume they got marching orders because obviously, but from where?

Ads. They need clicks to get ad money. Reasonable, balanced commentary doesn't get attention, and no attention == no clicks.

This isn't a monstrous conspiracy, it's been a thing since well before Hearst make up phony headlines to sell newspapers.

Plus the team making the game hyped it up greatly and released a sub-standard product, all the more disappointing given that their previous games, like the Witcher 3, were excellent.

Very cool and all, but when is the "make the game good" update coming? I'm more interested in that.

Well, it did get better.

Recent reviews: Very Positive (80% of 7,171) https://store.steampowered.com/app/1091500/Cyberpunk_2077/

7.6 User score https://www.metacritic.com/game/xbox-series-x/cyberpunk-2077

Unfortunately this isn’t enough to bump it to the top of my steam games backlog when sorted by review scores.

Are these also the movies you want to watch?

https://www.metacritic.com/browse/movies/score/metascore/all...

I get the point but as a counterpoint, why wouldn't they be?

User reviews improving somewhat due to an aggressive post-release marketing campaign (mostly revolving around the anime) doesn't really change the fact that the game is still missing many of the features promised before launch.

People are getting more and more blinded by this. This game was doomed by marketing in the first place, they clearly have a huge amount invested in their marketing vehicle. Of course they are going to use it to push anything at all.

Also, anime fangirling seems to be hitting new, previously unreached heights via Gen Z, and the steam reviews are full of quotez from it.

I get that promised features being cut hurts. But that doesn’t stop it from being a really fun game.

I played the game from day one and it was good to me.

But I’m not the average gamer, I don’t configure my graphics to some "ultra" unplayable settings and then complain that my current gen computer can’t run the game.

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