In this iteration of the Hardware and Graphics series, we talk about the incredible work the teams at CD Projekt Red and Nvidia have done to give us a glimpse of the future of 3D graphics.
In September 2023, CD Projekt Red released their sole expansion for their 2020 game, Cyberpunk 2077. The expansion, “Phantom Liberty”, takes the player to a new area of Night City (the game’s fictional city placed between San Francisco and Los Angeles).
While the expansion was excellent in its own right, Update 2.0 stood center stage, side by side with it. The free update not only contained a massive rework of in-game systems, but it also contained Nvidia’s new “Ray Reconstruction” technology, which “recognizes lighting patterns from training data, such as that of global illumination or ambient occlusion, and recreates it in-game as you play”1. In short, Ray Reconstruction is a feature within the DLSS software suite that uses AI-powered “denoisers” and lighting technology to render more accurate ray-traced rays and diffuse lighting.
The introduction of Ray Reconstruction comes off the heels of the “Path Tracing” update for Cyberpunk 2077 in April. Path Tracing, or “Full Ray Tracing”, takes single bounce (i.e. light “bouncing” off an object in a 3D rendered scene) ray tracing techniques to the next level by rendering ray-traced rays with multiple bounces. Its name is derived from “the rendering equation solved along the path of a ray”2. In other words, the game’s ray tracing implementation a step further by “accurately represent(ing) the way light scatters throughout a scene”2.
Combine these two features with the honed DLSS Super Resolution feature, which performs AI-powered upscaling and anti-aliasing for better performance (and sometimes better presentation with “DLAA” and “Quality” settings at higher resolutions), and Cyberpunk 2077 became one of the most impressive technology showcases of 2023.
I was so impressed with the art and technology that I took many screenshots with the in-game photo mode. After sifting through them for a long time, I’ve selected my favorite twenty screenshots. All screenshots were captured between 25 September 2023 and 15 October 2023.
If you couldn’t tell, I’m a little late to publishing this blog post.
These screenshots were taken from the 2.0 and 2.01 versions of the game, and take place throughout the main game and the new expansion.
All screenshots are “4K” (3840x2160p) images that were originally uncompressed PNG files. They have been converted to slightly lossy WebP images for size reduction. The game was running in HDR10 PQ, but images taken with the in-game photo mode are (I believe?) tone mapped to SDR.
The game’s settings were maxed out with Path Tracing, or “Full Ray Tracing”, enabled. Ray Reconstruction and Super Resolution were also enabled. I believe Super Resolution was set to “Auto” during the playthough, so I suspect the screenshots were taken at “DLAA” (no upscaling, solely AI-powered anti-aliasing) or “Quality” (highest quality upscaling) levels.
I’ll stop talking and let the screenshots speak for themselves. To say that I was impressed with the teams at CD Projekt Red and Nvidia would have been an understatement. If this is a sign of what is to come, bring it on!
