CD Projekt Red has now officially released the long-awaited patch for Cyberpunk 2077, bringing RT: Overdrive mode with Path Tracing technology preview, and other improvements. The new patch adds a Ray Tracing Overdrive and Path Tracing presets, which have to be manually enabled. Of course, the Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode is only supported on the NVIDIA RTX 40 series graphics cards, and it will work on the RTX 3090 graphics card, although it is only limited to 1080p resolution.

The new patch also adds an option to enable Path Tracing for Photo Mode, and adds support for NVIDIA DLAA, which is NVIDIA's AI-based anti-aliasing mode meant to improve image quality. To not make it all about NVIDIA, CD Projekt Red also added support for Intel XeSS 1.1, and some minor benchmark improvements. Unfortunately, and surprisingly, the new patch does not bring any expected gameplay improvements, which will probably come at a later date in a separate patch.

CD PROJEKT RED's Cyberpunk 2077 is already one of the most technologically advanced games available, using several ray tracing techniques to render its neon-illuminated environments and vast Night City visuals at incredible levels of detail. On April 11th, a new Cyberpunk 2077 update will hit the streets, featuring the technology preview of the Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode, which enhances the game's already-amazing visuals with full ray tracing, otherwise known as path tracing.

Full ray tracing accurately simulates light throughout an entire scene. It is used by visual effects artists to create film and TV graphics that are indistinguishable from reality, but until the arrival of GeForce RTX GPUs with RT Cores, and the AI-powered acceleration of NVIDIA DLSS, real-time video game full ray tracing was impossible because it's extremely GPU intensive.

Last week we announced Playground Games' Forza Horizon 5 added DLSS 3 to multiply performance and provide the definitive open-world racing experience. This week, DLSS 3 is available for Sackboy: A Big Adventure. And coming next week, the technology preview of Cyberpunk 2077's Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode will be released.

Sackboy: A Big Adventure DLSS 3 Update Available Now
PlayStation's iconic woolen hero stars in the PC edition of Sackboy: A Big Adventure. The dastardly Vex kidnapped Sackboy's friends and forced them to build his Topsy Turver. This most terrifyingly twisted device will transform Craftworld from a fantastical land of pure imagination and innocent dreams… into a torrid, barren eyesore of nightmares. Set off alone or with your bravest friends on a whirlwind of capers across the snowiest mountains, the leafiest jungles, the wettest underwater realms and the, uh, spaciest of space colonies. Take down Vex. Save the sack-folk. Save the day.

CD Projekt has revealed that 2022 was its second-best year in terms of financial results - it cites an uptick in sales of action role-playing shooter Cyberpunk 2077 as the main reason behind the nice boost to its earnings - around $222 million in revenue, leading to about $80 million in net profit. The Cyberpunk intellectual property has expanded beyond the scope of the video games format and onto the small screen - evidently a combination of the Netflix anime series adaptation and continued efforts into polishing and expanding the game has spread a positive word of mouth. The company states: "In 2022 CD PROJEKT RED carried out intensive work on Cyberpunk 2077, which resulted in successive updates and the next-gen console edition of the game. An important event was the well-received Netflix premiere of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. It attracted many new players to the game, and convinced many others to revisit Night City."

Adam Kiciński, CEO of CD PROJEKT was buoyed by these results and set expectations for continuations in both fields in the future: "The popularity of the series and the positive reception of the update, released a week before the premiere, had a notable effect on Cyberpunk sales and general sentiment around the game, as evidenced by gamers' reviews. This is a clear sign that deeper involvement in our franchises and expanding their reach is the right way to go. Another important event supporting the Cyberpunk franchise will be the release of Phantom Liberty - a large expansion scheduled for this year."

In an interview done by PCWorld's Gordon Ung at GDC 2023, CD Projekt Red's VP and Global Art Director, Jakub "Kuba" Knapik, and NVIDIA's Senior Developer Technology Engineer, Pawel Kozlowski, shed a bit more light about the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 Path Tracing update and what it brings to the game as well as what kind of hardware will you need to run it.

In case you missed it earlier, both CD Projekt RED and NVIDIA did talk about the RTX Path Tracing Overdrive Mode for Cyberpunk 2077, which will launch on April 11th. This will be a part of the Cyberpunk 2077 Update 1.62, which should bring additional gameplay improvements as well. It is worth to note that Path Tracing will be introduced to the game as a "technology preview," Jakub notes, as the developer is implementing this technology with NVIDIA and it is still a work in progress.

NVIDIA has released the latest version of its GeForce Game Ready drivers, the version 531.41 WHQL. The new release provides the best day-0 gaming experience for Diablo IV beta phase, including support for DLSS 2, as well as the same DLSS 2 support for The Last of Us Part I, Smalland: Survive the Wild, and Deceive Inc. The new NVIDIA GeForce Game Ready Drivers 531.41 WHQL is also the Game Ready driver for Resident Evil 4 and it adds DLSS 3 support for Forza Horizon 5. Most importantly, it also adds support for the technology preview of Cyberpunk 2077's Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode. The new NVIDIA GeForce Game Ready Drivers 531.41 WHQL also adds several GeForce Experience Profiles, as well as fixes several issues.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce Game Ready 531.41 WHQL

Update: Added Open Issues to the release highlights.

As promised and detailed earlier, NVIDIA has now released the first SDK for Path Tracing. Path Tracing, which should accurately re-create physics of all light sources in a scene, has been around and we already had a chance to see it in some demos like Quake RTX and Portal RTX, but now, thanks to some previously available NVIDIA tools and features, it could be finally coming to more games and not just tech demos.

According to NVIDIA, the thing that makes Path Tracing possible now, and more accessible to developers, is the combination of previously available NVIDIA technologies, as well as some new ones, including the new performance multiplier in DLSS 3, called the DLSS Frame Generation. The DLSS Frame Generation, working on GeForce 40 series cards and using the Optical Flow Accelerator, is what made real-time path tracing possible. The RTX Path Tracing SDK, according to NVIDIA, should re-create the physics of all light sources in a scene in order to reproduce what the eye sees in real life, and allows to build a reference path traces to ensure that lighting during production is true to life, while accelerating the iteration process; or build high-quality photo modes for RT-capable GPUs or real-time, ultra-quality modes that take advantage of the Ada Lovelace architecture.

CDProjekt Red today released a major update to Cyberpunk 2077, which adds support for the NVIDIA DLSS 3 performance enhancement. DLSS 3 leverages the Optical Flow Accelerator component of GeForce RTX 40-series "Ada" graphics cards to generate nearly every alternate frame entirely using AI, without involving the main graphics rendering pipeline, with which it nearly doubles frame-rates at quality comparable to native resolution. When used in conjunction with DLSS quality settings, DLSS 3 ends up working like a frame-rate multiplier. The feature also ends up positively impacting energy efficiency of the GPU. DLSS 3 requires a GeForce RTX 40-series GPU.

With only a couple of days to go until the AMD RX 7900-series benchmarks go live, some alleged benchmarks from both the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT have leaked on Twitter. The two cards are being compared to a NVIDIA RTX 4080 card in no less than seven different game titles, all running at 4K resolution. The games are God of War, Cyberpunk 2077, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Watchdogs Legion, Red Dead Redemption 2, Doom Eternal and Horizon Zero Dawn. The cards were tested on a system with a Core i9-12900K CPU which was paired with 32 GB of RAM of unknown type.

It's too early to draw any real conclusions from this test, but in general, the RX 7900 XTX comes out on top, ahead of the RTX 4080, so no surprises here. The RX 7900 XT is either tied with the RTX 4080 or a fair bit slower, with the exception being Red Dead Redemption 2, where the RTX 4080 is the slowest card, although it also appears to have some issues, since the one percent lows are hitting 2 FPS. Soon, the reviews will be out and everything will become more clear, but it appears that AMD's RX 7900 XTX will give NVIDIA's RTX 4080 a run for its money, if these benchmarks are anything to go by.

Update Dec 11th: The original tweet has been removed, for unknown reasons. It could be because the numbers were fake, or because they were in breach of AMD's NDA.

NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) today reported revenue for the third quarter ended October 30, 2022, of $5.93 billion, down 17% from a year ago and down 12% from the previous quarter. GAAP earnings per diluted share for the quarter were $0.27, down 72% from a year ago and up 4% from the previous quarter. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $0.58, down 50% from a year ago and up 14% from the previous quarter.

"We are quickly adapting to the macro environment, correcting inventory levels and paving the way for new products," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "The ramp of our new platforms - Ada Lovelace RTX graphics, Hopper AI computing, BlueField and Quantum networking, Orin for autonomous vehicles and robotics, and Omniverse-is off to a great start and forms the foundation of our next phase of growth.

Benchmarks of NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce RTX 4080 (formerly known as the RTX 4080 16 GB) are already out as the leaky taps in the Asian tech forumscape know no bounds. Someone with access to an RTX 4080 sample and drivers on ChipHell forums, put it through a battery of synthetic and gaming tests. The $1,200 MSRP graphics card was tested on 3DMark Time Spy, Port Royal, and games that include Forza Horizon 5, Call of Duty Modern Warfare II, Cyberpunk 2077, Borderlands 3, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

The big picture: the RTX 4080 is found to be halfway between the RTX 3090 Ti and the RTX 4090. At stock settings, and in 3DMark Time Spy Extreme (4K), it has 71% the performance of an RTX 4090, whereas the RTX 3090 Ti is 55% that of the RTX 4090. With its "power limit" slider maxed out, the RTX 4080 inches 2 percentage-points closer to the RTX 4090 (73% that of the RTX 4090), and with a bit of manual OC, it adds another 4 percentage-points. Things change slightly with 3DMark Port Royal, where the RTX 4080 is 69% the performance of the RTX 4090 in a test where the RTX 3090 Ti does 58% that of the RTX 4090.

AMD on Thursday launched the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT RDNA3 graphics cards. With these, the company claims to have repeated its feat of a 50+ percent performance/Watt gain over the previous-generation, which propelled the RX 6000-series to competitiveness with NVIDIA's fastest RTX 30-series SKUs. AMD's performance claims for the Radeon RX 7900 XTX put the card at anywhere between 50% to 70% faster than the company's current flagship, the RX 6950 XT, when tested at 4K UHD resolution. Digging through these claims, and piecing together relevant information from the Endnotes, HXL was able to draw an extrapolated performance comparison between the RX 7900 XTX, the real-world tested RTX 4090, and previous-generation flagships RTX 3090 Ti and RX 6950 XT.

The graphs put the Radeon RX 7900 XTX menacingly close to the GeForce RTX 4090. In Watch_Dogs Legion, the RTX 4090 is 6.4% faster than the RX 7900 XTX. Cyberpunk 2077 and Metro Exodus see the two cards evenly matched, with a delta under 1%. The RTX 4090 is 4.4% faster with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (2022). Accounting for the pinch of salt usually associated with launch-date first-party performance claims; the RX 7900 XTX would end up within 5-10% of the RTX 4090, but pricing changes everything. The RTX 4090 is a $1,599 (MSRP) card, whereas the RX 7900 XTX is $999. Assuming the upcoming RTX 4080 (16 GB) is around 10% slower than the RTX 4090; the main clash for this generation will be between the RTX 4080 and RX 7900 XTX. Even here, AMD gets ahead with pricing, as the RTX 4080 was announced with an MSRP of $1,199 (exactly 20% pricier than the RX 7900 XTX). With the FSR 3.0 Fluid Motion announcement, AMD also blunted NVIDIA's DLSS 3 Frame Generation performance advantage.

NVIDIA and CD Projekt RED (CDPR) came up with a unique giveaway for three GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition graphics cards that have been customized with an ultra-rare Cyberpunk 2077-themed backplate. Even if not for the backplate, just the fact that you could win an RTX 4090 should get you to "dust off" Cyberpunk 2077 from your Steam library, reinstall it with its latest update that includes a crazy graphics present aptly named "overdrive," and explore every nook and corner of Night City for clues leading up to the card. These cards are hidden away as premium gear, and everyone who finds the card in the game stands a chance to win one IRL. For more information, visit this page.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 is turning out to be a cool operator, with the GPU reportedly boosting up to 2.8 GHz (2810 to 2850 MHz) at stock settings, when playing Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p, in its "psycho" settings preset. with DLSS and Reflex disabled. At native resolution, the RTX 4090 scores 59 FPS (49 FPS at 1% lows), with a frame-time of 72 to 75 ms. With 100% GPU utilization, the card barely breaks a sweat, with GPU temperatures reported in the region of 50 to 55 °C. With DLSS 3 enabled, the game nearly doubles in frame-rate, to 119 FPS (1% lows), and an average latency of 53 ms. This is a net 2X gain in frame-rate with latency reduced by a third. The power-draw is also said to be significantly reduced. The card pulls up to 461 W when rendering at native-resolution, but this drops down to 348 W with DLSS 3 "quality," a 25% reduction.

At the heart of the GeForce RTX 4090 is the gigantic AD102 silicon, which we broadly detailed in an older article. Built on the 4 nm silicon fabrication process, this chip measures 608 mm² in die-area, and crams in 76.3 billion transistors. We now have our first look into the silicon-level block diagram of the AD102, including the introduction of several new components.

The AD102 features a PCI-Express 4.0 x16 host interface, and a 384-bit GDDR6X memory interface. The Gigathread Engine acts as a the main resource allocation component of the silicon. Ada introduces the Optical Flow Accelerator, a component crucial for DLSS 3 to generate entire frames without involving the graphics rendering machinery. The chip features double the number of media-encoding hardware engines as "Ampere," including hardware-accelerated AV1 encode/decode. Multiple accelerators mean that multiple streams of videos can be transcoded (helpful in a media production environment), or transcoding is performed at twice the FPS rate (each encoder takes turns at encoding a single frame).

NVIDIA today unveiled the GeForce RTX 40 Series of GPUs, designed to deliver revolutionary performance for gamers and creators, led by its new flagship, the RTX 4090 GPU, with up to 4x the performance of its predecessor. The world's first GPUs based on the new NVIDIA Ada Lovelace architecture, the RTX 40 Series delivers massive generational leaps in performance and efficiency, and represents a new era of real-time ray tracing and neural rendering, which uses AI to generate pixels.

"The age of RTX ray tracing and neural rendering is in full steam, and our new Ada Lovelace architecture takes it to the next level," said Jensen Huang, NVIDIA's founder and CEO, at the GeForce Beyond: Special Broadcast at GTC. "Ada provides a quantum leap for gamers and paves the way for creators of fully simulated worlds. With up to 4x the performance of the previous generation, Ada is setting a new standard for the industry," he said.

A Steam Deck enthusiast has done what Steam would not (at least not in the first rendition of its popular Steam Deck handheld console): he went and added an external GPU to the mix. The owner of the ETA Prime YouTube channel managed to increase the Steam Deck's APU-powered graphical oomph with a much more powerful AMD RX 6900 XT graphics card. To do so required sacrifices however: since the SteamDeck doesn't feature a proper Thunderbolt 3/4 connector, ETA Prime had to remove the Steam Deck's SSD from its M.2 port, instead mounting a special M.2 to PCIe adapter in the SSD slot itself.

This, of course, required that installed games be run off memory cards, which generally offer lower speeds (a less than stellar experience) than the onboard SSD. It also required butchering the Steam Deck's OS by replacing it with Windows 11. But it did allow the Steam Deck's APU to tap onto power otherwise unavailable to it, unlocking playable framerates with maxed out detail settings on games such as God of War, Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, and others.

CD PROJEKT RED today revealed that the next installment in The Witcher series of video games is currently in development with Unreal Engine 5, kicking off a new saga for the franchise and a new technology partnership with Epic Games.

Today's announcement marks the first official confirmation of a new game in The Witcher series since the release of CD PROJEKT RED's previous single-player, AAA RPG in the franchise—The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt—which won a total of 250 Game of the Year awards and was later expanded upon with the Hearts of Stone and Blood & Wine add-ons.

The Radeon 680M integrated graphics powering the AMD Ryzen 6000-series mobile processors is proving to be an entry-level discrete-GPU killer. TechEpiphany posted a video presentation showing the iGPU's real-world gameplay performance with the AAA title "Cyberpunk 2077" at Full HD (1080p), with a little help from FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR). TechEpiphany used an ASUS TUF GAMING F17 notebook powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 6800H "Rembrandt" processor that has the full Radeon 680M iGPU unlocked, with all its 12 RDNA2 compute units (768 stream processors), 12 Ray Accelerators, 16 ROPs, and 48 TMUs, enabled. The notebook also features a GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop GPU, but for this testing, it was disabled.

The first part of the video shows the game running at 1080p and Medium-High settings, with FSR set at Ultra Quality. Here, the iGPU is managing 30-40 FPS. Real-time ray tracing is disabled. In the second part, they enabled ray tracing and FidelityFX Super Resolution, but this is where the iGPU runs out of steam. Frame-rates drop to unplayable levels, but there still aren't any noticeable visual artifacts or rendering errors typically associated with iGPUs made to render games above their pay-grade. It's still impressive to see that AMD following through on its promise of bringing 1080p gaming across a broader range of titles. The TechEpiphany video presentation can be watched in the source link below.

NVIDIA DLSS adoption is growing rapidly, accelerated by easy-to-use Unreal Engine plugins and native support in Unity. This month 10 new games get DLSS, and a number of others, including Cyberpunk 2077, get upgraded to the new NVIDIA DLSS 2.3 SDK for even better image quality. With an AI model that continuously improves through training on NVIDIA's supercomputer, NVIDIA DLSS offers the best image quality and performance for over 130 games and applications.

To deliver a level of performance and image quality far above that of traditional upscaling technologies, NVIDIA DLSS utilizes an AI model trained on supercomputers, deep game integrations, and GeForce RTX Tensor Cores. Our DLSS AI model is always learning, and our newest update, NVIDIA DLSS 2.3, is available now. It makes smarter use of a game's motion vectors to improve object detail in motion, particle reconstruction, ghosting, and temporal stability.

Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red has shared details on the upcoming 1.3 patch, which should be hitting all platforms sooner rather than later. This particular patch is the first one that doesn't specifically focus on only bug and performance fixes, in that it also includes the first pieces of free DLC CD Projekt Red has announced even before the games' release - and towards its spectacularly negative reception between media outlets and gamers alike. These free DLCs are really small things for now, too: there's an alternate appearance for Johnny Silverhand, a couple of jackets (Multi-layered Syn-Leather Deltajock Jacket and Luminescent Punk Jacket). In addition to these two, and the new Archer Quartz "Bandit" vehicle.

General performance improvements are expected to be reached with this particular version due to the addition of Dynamic Resolution Scaling, which enables the game to change rendering resolution on the fly so as to achieve a particular framerate target. No support for AMD's FSR on consoles as of yet, and one has to wonder why: it would be a relatively straightforward way to claw back some performance, particularly in the underpowered, last-gen consoles that have been hit the most by the games' performance issues. A gazillion (it's not a scientific number, only an approximation) of quest and bug fixes have also made it into patch 1.3, and represent the vast majority of the developer-hours it took to develop this particular patch. There are also improvements to performance in Screen Space Reflections, and an increase in the amount of available save slots. "Last", but not least, is an improvement to the minimap - it should now zoom out whenever a player is in a vehicle, so as to allow pilots to actually be able to react to curves as they appear on the map... eight months after the games' release. You can look for the full list of fixes over at CD Projekt Red's blog post.

Ah, Cyberpunk 2077. The gift that keeps on giving, and the gift which will probably give the most around one-year after launch, when developer CD Projekt Red manages to fix the underlying issues and build upon features that were supposed to be there - but weren't. Following the launch debacle and subsequent removal from the PlayStation Store - which led to a severe-yet-not-crushing profit decline for the company - Cyberpunk 2077 has quickly found itself as the top selling game on PlayStation's digital storefront - a mere month after its reintroduction in version 1.22.

The game essentially climbed towards the top seller spot for the last month of June in both the US and Europe - despite having to fight its way through seasonal heavy-hitters such as FIFA 21, NBA 2K21, and the still incredibly-selling Grand Theft Auto V. And it did so with only half the days left throughout the month. With the game having been given a constant - and extremely needed - attention from CD Projekt Red via updates, and a next-gen update on the horizon (which is free to last-gen version owners, by the way), Cyberpunk 2077 could further cement itself in CD Projekt Red's portfolio - and more importantly, in gamers' minds. We collective gamers will be the judges of that.

Don't hold your breath for Grand Theft Auto 6, as the game won't be out before 2025, reports Tom Henderson. Timelines for development of the next GTA was pushed this far back possibly because the extensive amount of voice-over and motion-capture work that goes into the game, and playtesting the game, probably aren't easy in the wake of travel restrictions. The Cyberpunk 2077 launch, which was disastrous form a quality-assurance standpoint, possibly spooked Rockstar, which wants to take its own sweet time getting GTA 6 right.

A third factor could be the increased scrutiny from gamers on studios that crunch (overwork their employees to meet release dates), Rockstar was accused of crunching during the development of Red Dead Redemption 2. In related news, GTA 6 will reportedly be based around a modern-day rendition of Vice City, from the title that springboarded GTA to the top of the open-world action adventure genre. It is also rumored to have Fortnite-like evolving maps, which gives players the feel of a world that changes with time like a city in real life, would (new infrastructure and businesses).

Cyberpunk 2077 was originally released on December 10th for PC, Xbox, and PlayStation as the most anticipated game of 2020. The game launched with a multitude of performance issues and bugs which made the game nearly unplayable on the PlayStation 4 and as such was promptly removed from the store. CD Projekt Red has worked to improve the game's performance with various hotfixes and patches and it appears Sony is happy with this progress as the game has been reinstated on the store after 6 months. The game is now officially recommended to be run on PS4 Pro or PS5 for the optimal experience however the PS4 will continue to be supported.

CD Projekt RedYou can play the game on PlayStation 4 Pro and PlayStation 5. Additionally, a free next gen upgrade will be available for all owners of the PS4 version of Cyberpunk 2077 in the second half of 2021. Users may continue to experience some performance issues with the PS4 edition while we continue to improve stability across all platforms. The PS4 Pro and PS5 versions of the game will provide the best experience on PlayStation.

Cyberpunk 2077, one of the most hyped AAA game releases in 2020, has been out for a while now. However, not too long ago, Sony, the maker of PlayStation, has pulled the game from its PlayStation Store amidst negative reviews and criticism that the game received. This has resulted in significantly lower sales of the game, as millions of potential buyers were left without an option to purchase it. But not everything is too dark. In the announcement made by CD Projekt RED, the game developer behind Cyberpunk 2077, things are looking bright for the game as Cyberpunk 2077 is returning to the PlayStation store on June 21st. You can see the quote from CDPR below.

CD Projekt REDIn relation to Current Report no. 66/2020 of 18 December 2020, the Management Board of CD PROJEKT S.A. with a registered office in Warsaw hereby publicly discloses the decision by Sony Interactive Entertainment to reinstate the availability of the digital edition of Cyberpunk 2077 on PlayStation Store, effective on 21 June 2021.