Although from the customer’s point of view the RTX 20 series of graphics cards was not at all advantageous in terms of price / performance, it was definitely revolutionary to a large extent for the entire industry, because it brought hardware acceleration of ray tracing. The beginnings were not easy, but gradually the technology began to enter more games. Some have a worse implementation, but some are very good and thanks to ray tracing we can enjoy beautiful lighting, shadows or reflections in them.
Recently, however, titles have begun to appear that go a little further and use path tracing. This is basically a type of ray tracing, the definition of which is not entirely clear. However, Nvidia uses this term for such an implementation of RT where it is used for the entire scene, and not just selected parts such as shadows. A typical example is the recent Portal RTX, which is quite possibly one of the most demanding games of all time, but at the same time it showed that real-time path tracing is possible.
It seems that the first newer game that could implement path tracing is Cyberpunk 2077. The so-called Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode was first announced when the RTX 40 graphics cards were introduced. However, we have now learned that a special presentation at GDC, which will take place on March 22. Representatives of Nvidia and CD Projekt RED should present here how everything works. The new version promises RT reflections with higher resolution and better direct and indirect lighting thanks to the fact that the rays can be reflected several times.
We don’t yet know exactly when Overdrive Mode will arrive. At the same time, it is quite likely that it will be very demanding even for the most powerful graphics cards at the moment, such as the RTX 4090.
