Cyberpunk 2077 is not only the most anticipated title of the year as a game itself, but also in terms of technology – especially because of ray tracing.
We have therefore already taken a closer look at the implementation of real-time ray tracing. How good does it look, is it even noticeable? And what about DLSS?
How good is Cyberpunk 2077 you can find out in our detailed GameStar test with evaluation:
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Cyberpunk 2077 im Test
An important note in advance: We don’t make a statement about the performance at this point, because we only looked at the preliminary version of Cyberpunk 2077, which is not yet final in terms of performance. A separate technology test for the release version and a separate test for performance under ray tracing and DLSS with benchmarks will follow soon.
Our test system:
You can find out more about Cyberpunk 2077 at GameStar-Plus:
We also took a close look at all the graphics options of the PC version and listed them in detail:
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Cyberpunk 2077: All Graphics Options
Raytracing Reflexionen
One of the most noticeable effects from the ray tracing repertoire are reflections. Cyberpunk 2077 is no exception, as the following images show:
Reflections are the flagship of ray tracing, but still only part of the overall concept.
In the puddle in the left picture you can see a detailed reflection, in which the lanterns hanging over the street are also captured. In the right picture with Screen Space Reflections on Ultra, on the other hand, only rough color samples can be seen.
The slider images (images with slide control) for all ray tracing effects are 4K screenshots cut to 2,560 x 1,440 pixels for better overlaying.
Raytracing Diffuse Beleuchtung
Raytracing Diffuse Illumination, in Europe diffuse lighting, is less obvious.
There are a lot of neon signs in Cyberpunk 2077.
In the left picture, the neon sign (the two figures next to the door) casts diffuse light onto the wall behind it, while in the right picture nothing of it can be seen.
Raytracing Schatten
Depending on the scene, the ray tracing shadows are not always as clearly distinguishable from the regular variant as the reflections, as you can see in the following pictures:
To see the differences, you have to look very carefully.
In the left picture, near the small windows behind the garbage can, the shadows of the protruding wall are more diffuse than in the picture on the right. The garbage bags in the container appear darker on the left and thus more realistically shaded than on the right.
Overall impression and DLSS
Viewed in isolation, some of the effects are not quite as great as one might expect from the term ray tracing. But if you look at the overall picture, everything looks more realistic:
Ray tracing paints a more realistic picture of Night City.
The red neon advertising in the two images blends diffusely with the surroundings in the left image. The deeper you look into the scene, the lower the impression of sharpness, and the shadows appear softer. In the right image, on the other hand, the impression of sharpness remains clearer, shadows and colors are still strongly saturated even from a distance.
You can marvel at what real-time ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077 looks like in action in the following trailer:
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Cyberpunk 2077 – New trailer shows the amazing RTX effects in action
DLSS in Cyberpunk: We also got a first impression of the implementation of Nvidia’s AI upscaler DLSS. The following images show the scene once with maximum ray tracing without DLSS, ray tracing with DLSS in quality mode and DLSS in performance mode:
The impression of sharpness in depth increases again through both DLSS modes and is therefore somewhat closer to the original image without ray tracing. Overall, DLSS delivers very good image quality, although the performance mode, as expected, drops slightly with a somewhat coarser image.
What is DLSS? The abbreviation stands for Deep Learning Super Sampling and describes an AI-supported scaling technique that can be used to infer from a low to a higher resolution based on high-resolution images. For example, the AI is trained on 16K images in order to be able to subsequently switch from 1080p to 4K. You can read about how well DLSS is doing this in the following article:
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More fps and better graphics
You can watch the spoiler-free video summary of the Cyberpunk 2077 test here:
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Cyberpunk 2077 played through – test result in the video
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