Game developer CDPR announced at the Game Developers Conference 2023 in San Francisco that it will launch a pathtracking RT Overdrive mode for its game Cyberpunk 2077 on April 11.
It’s also the fourth game to get real-time pathtracking, following Minecraft, Portal and Quake.
“Not only does this provide better visuals for players, but it has the potential to revolutionize the entire game production process,” said Pawel Kozlowski, senior technical development engineer at Nvidia.
Ray tracing and path tracing are two popular methods used in computer graphics to simulate the behavior of light in a virtual environment. Ray tracing is a deterministic process that involves tracing the path of rays and their interactions. This technique requires a lot of processing power and has the advantage of producing high-quality images with accurate reflection, refraction and shading.
Path tracing, by contrast, is a process of random calculation that involves sampling the path of light rays as they pass through the scene. This technique is less computationally expensive than ray-tracing, but it produces image noise that requires multiple iterations to converge to high-quality results. Path tracking is commonly used in applications that require a physically accurate simulation of light, such as architectural visualization and product design.