The Overdrive Mode has been added to Cyberpunk 2077 with the latest update. Courtesy of path-tracing, the game’s visual fidelity has been significantly improved. We’re looking at enhanced shadows, reflections, and ambient occlusion. In a previous article, we already compared the impact of ray-tracing and path-tracing on image quality. In this one, we have a look at the performance.
We paired the GeForce RTX 4080 with the Intel Core i9-13900KF on the ASUS ROG Maximus Hero. Two 16GB DDR5 6000MT/s DIMMs and the Lian Li Galahad 360 AIO cooler were used. Here are the 1080p benchmarks at native with ray-tracing, path-tracing, and DLSS 2 and 3.
NVIDIA’s RTX 40 series GPUs handle ray-traced workloads quite well. Even at native 1080p, the RTX 4080 nets 148 FPS in ray-tracing, which gets cut down to just 48 FPS when Overdrive Mode is enabled. With DLSS 2, the RTX 4080 averages 99 FPS at 1080p using the Overdrive Mode. DLSS 3 lifts back the performance up to ray-tracing levels which is exactly what it’s supposed to do.
The RTX 4080 holds its own at 1440p. It nets averages of 98 FPS and 30 FPS with ray tracing and path tracing at native 1440p. DLSS 2 buoys the performance up to 69 FPS, with DLSS 3 boosting it to 112 FPS on average. These numbers show that path tracing is thrice as intensive as ray tracing, even on the fastest graphics cards.
Finally, we have the 4K numbers. The RTX 4080 nets a paltry 14 FPS in Overdrive Mode without any upscaling method. DLSS 2 increases the average frame rate to 35 FPS, while DLSS 3 makes for a very playable 70.5 FPS. That’s higher than the ray-tracing numbers at native 4K. In this case, path tracing is 3.5x slower than ray tracing. This makes sense as the ray counts are directly proportional to the pixel counts in path tracing. On the other hand, Ray tracing isn’t affected by the resolution.
