Three months since Cyberpunk 2077 published and it’s set to eventually offer you real-time beam tracing on AMD RDNA 2 graphics cards. After initially launching with support for Nvidia’s graphics cards with the match’s upcoming patch 1.2 it’ll be possible to empower real-time ray tracing on AMD’s great deal, too.
That means we’ll soon have a chance to provide AMD’s Radeon RX 6900 XT a run for its money, since I guess you’ll require AMD’s best card to perform anything close to speedy framerates with ray tracing enabled. Cyberpunk 2077 is horribly demanding at the best of times and, together with beam tracing enabled, it may bring anything less than the top to its knees.
One potential salve for slow performance in the game (once you’ve whacked everything up to max), at least on Nvidia’s GPUs, has been DLSS upscaling. Taking the load off the silicon in high resolutions, DLSS has been the key to smooth framerates in-game for non GPUs and for enabling ray tracing with the best graphics cards moving, like the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090.
The RX 6900 XT is a close match for the pair in rasterised making, meaning it will play the match sans beam with near-enough functionality parity, but the red team’s beam tracing silicon, called Ray Accelerators, haven’t shown themselves quite as convenient for ray tracing as Nvidia’s RT Cores.
Without a DLSS alternative just yet, it is looking less rosy for the red team when ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077. AMD is assuring a DLSS analogue because of its FidelityFX package of GPU features, although we have no firm date for when that’ll arrive nor which games it will encourage.
AMD ray tracing performance will certainly be top of the list to try out in-game whenever the patch drops, which is still arriving”shortly”, according to the official patch notes published today.
There’s been no official word about why beam tracing wasn’t ready on AMD’s GPUs for the game’s much-delayed December launch, but I’d suspect it’s something to do with the lack of AMD compatible ray tracing silicon up before November, when the Radeon RX 6800 XT and Radeon RX 6800 released.
