CyberPunk 2077 Gets the Full Ray Tracing Upgrade we longed for April 8th
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It is finally coming, the One, True upgrade we asked, nah, needed for our PS5 Pro’s. Only 5+ years after launch, and around 3 years since CD Projekt Red Ended life support on their Red Engine, Full Ray Tracing and PSSR 2.0 hits the console world for the first time. Announced last month and now detailed in a new PlayStation Blog post, the team have added another augmented version into the games “patchy” history. PS5 Pro players have already been able to play with Ray Tracing and better performance before this, but now CDP have moved beyond just Ray Traced Shadows.
What’s in the Package?
As the team announced already when PSSR2.0 dropped, CD Projekt Red have added enhancements and choice to each and every mode in this new update. So the game should look sharper, cleaner, more stable and closer to that high end DLSS powered PC experience it shines brightest on. But that is not all, the Ray Tracing cores and BVH8 SIMD units that reside inside the RDNA4/Hybrid powered PS5 Pro’s GPU, enable much faster Ray Triangle intersection and Bounding Box hierarchical traversal. What this means is the PS5 Pro can deliver Ray Tracing calculations much faster than the PS5 and can do much more in the same due to its circa 67% faster GPU and over 2x faster Ray Tracing hardware.
And the team have used that power well it seems, with Local Ray Traced Shadows still present, as before in the PS5’s Ray Tracing mode. Now they are are joined by the real boosts to visual quality and lighting accuracy, Ray Traced Sun Shadowes, Ray Traced Lighting and Reflections. As I covered with my plethora of CyberPunk 2077 reviews on my channel and over on IGN for my Performance Review videos, the updated visual quality and material accuracy that global illumination, shadows, Ambient Occlusion and Reflections brings is a huge uplift in the quality and visual style the game has. In the games 3 modes, the “Ray Tracing Pro” mode offers all the RT features which include emissive lights from the plethora of Neon signs in Night City. This will add more light, shadow across static and dynamic objects in the game, this mode will be capped at 30fps for 60Hz screens and the current generation nirvana middle ground of 40fps on 120Hz/Variable Refresh Rate screens, to ensure visual quality and performance are aligned.
Auxilary power
Beyond this main, meat mode, we do get another two. The first is the performance mode that, along with a 120Hz VRR screen, can run up to 90fps with a mix of PSSR2 and other effects in place to balance speed freaks with graphics junkies.
The third, and final, mode is the best of both, Ray Tracing mode, which targets 60fps and also offers high visual quality with PSSR2 but also a selection of Ray Traced effects, which the safe assumption is Reflections will be dropped in favour of the older, cheaper Screen Space Reflections Post Processing pass to balance the visual boosts with a, we hope, stable 60fps readout.
But, only a day to wait before I get a video up and put the new mode to the test to see how much brigher, Night City is under the PS5 Pro’s enhanced modes. Be sure to check back on my channel and Website to read more on this and other gaming, hardware, retro and techno news.
