Just yesterday NVIDIA announced that CD Projekt Red’s upcoming RPG, Cyberpunk 2077 will be supporting a slew of RTX-specific technologies including ray-traced reflections, ambient occlusion, diffused illumination as well as shadows. A preview of the game was shown off which, honestly speaking, did look impressive. However, as per German Outlet, PCGH, who got to play the demo firsthand at an event, it was running at 1080p using NVIDIA’s Turing flagship, the RTX 2080 Ti, that too at just 60 FPS.
To top it off, not all ray-tracing effects were enabled. RT Reflections that are the most taxing were missing. DLSS 2.0 was also employed which means that the native resolution was likely 720p. A game running at sub-1080p resolutions on the RTX 2080 Ti doesn’t sound too encouraging. According to the folks who tried out the demo, it wasn’t even a constant 60 FPS experience. There were drops to 30 FPS in many locations, especially while driving.
This would explain why the game was further delayed to November. My guess is that it’s not only to work on optimizations, but also to await the launch of the next-gen Ampere and Navi 2x graphics cards as present-gen cards likely won’t be able to run the game at ultra with all the ray-tracing effects turned on, even with DLSS enabled.
NVIDIA’s Ampere cards are slated for launch in August or September while the competing AMD Navi 2x GPUs should also launch in the same time window. That should give CDPR around a month or two to see how their upcoming game performs on next-gen hardware.
