[Digital Foundry] Cyberpunk 2077 First impressions: The new graphics king has arrived

No footage because it ain't an analysis. This will be coming later.

Says it's kind of like the new Crysis and that it feels that it has been built from the ground up to take advantage of PC's latest features. Pushes visuals to the limits and is the most visually-dense, impressively lit city he has ever seen in an open-world.

Can't wait to see 9th gen consoles get their optimization upgrades.

Cool... But its a buggy mess so I don't really care, and judging from most impressions its not as good as Witcher 3 full stop even if it ran flawlessly with no glitches.

Its a huge let down, I will pick it up once I get a RTX 3080.

some new Nvidia game ready drivers released today, hopefully that further improves performance in addition to the removal of heavy DRM

The game has a day 1 patch coming out, so I expect that will take care of a lot of the glitches/bugs that early reviewers were seeing.

I'd go in with low expectations on that. If they resolved 90% of everything then great, but more than likely the day 1 patch will only be covering hard crashes and other game-breakers. The game from reports has lots of physics and visual issues, and I can't imagine they cleared them up that much in the mere week or 2 weeks of review period.

Good video - I think this is going to make the doubters believers in RTX (for those who care to look and punish their machines that way)

RTX made a huge difference in Metro Exodus.

Doubters?... They aren't doubters they are just dumb people. Doubting ray tracing is like doubting motion capture.

So basically its the first real next-gen game

They couldn't show actual ray tracing just footage that the developer is allowing to be shown which is screen space reflection. I am not sure which section of the video would change someone's mind on DXR.

@Pedro: I know - I watched it. I shouldn't have used a dash. Those were two separate thoughts. But the reason I said that is they state that the rtx lighting makes an enormous difference and that it's just the best looking open world game in no small part due to it

I'd feel bad for people playing this on consoles pre-next gen patch. Must be blurrier than a 1980's reel film. Also first person and 30 FPS. Yikes.

But there is nothing to show to back this claim. Beyond that, DF usage of words is as tropish as Simon Cowell.

@Pedro: well, we do have the other thread...

@xantufrog: I didn't know folks were posting actual footage in the mess of a thread that is the main thread.

Cool, guess we can start new meme. Can it run 2077?

It's definitely a hog, however the DLSS implementation is excellent and makes a massive difference to the experience. on my 3080 without DLSS I am getting ~45fps all ultra and full RT, with DLSS in quality mode this jumps to ~75 fps. There is indistinguishable difference in the image quality with DLSS on, very impressed.

The RT in use is also not overbearing but you definitely know it's on and you definitely miss it once you realise what you're missing out on after playing with it.

This game has certainly made it clear to me that RT along with clever scaling tech such as DLSS is a big step forward in gaming.

The legendary FPS GOD plays the longest awaited RPG game and honestly I'm swept away by how crisp and real-like the first person POV was. Compared to previous games that emulates alternate reality, this game is by far the best in its turf! Moreover, it definitely utilizes the DLSS feature on an RT card! Looks like a promising future for crisp game graphics on future games if you ask me. Though I could only watch to experience this masterpiece since my rig can't support it so I feast my eyes watching shroud playing the game on twitch.

I agree, the DLSS is a pretty dang good showing and does wonders for the frames. It actually looks legit too. How are you getting 45 FPS all ultra and full RT w/o DLSS...tell me your secret? Now! :) I have tried turning off DLSS and I net low 30's on a 3090. I cap my frames at 62 with auto DLSS. When I go to Quality I loose a few frames putting me in the low/middle range 52-55 fps.

* I got too ahead of myself.....slaps forehead as I finished typing that. Duh! What resolution may I ask? I am at 4k ultrawide.

@mobius_basic: only 1440p for me which will explain the difference.

@netracing Thanks for the clarification. I jumped the gun thinking I could get some more performance!

@xantufrog: I don’t think people doubt ray tracing. But even a RTX 3090 struggles to do Ray tracing while maintaining visuals and steady performance at 60 frames per second without DLSS.

So right now, it’s not really a feasible. However, in two or three years it should be massive. Console Won’t really benefit from true for Ray tracing until Xbox series elite and PlayStation 5 pro are out.

@BlackShirt20: some people on here have definitely been dogged in arguing it's a gimmick.

@BlackShirt20: exactly why I don’t care for it, rather have the higher frames, once cards come out that will produce ray tracing and high frames then I’m all in. I don’t think the sacrifice for ray tracing is worth it at the moment

Doesn't even look that good.

MSFS2020, Star Citizen, Ghostrunner and Control all look better.

@xantufrog: Ray tracing is in its infancy. So it’s kind of a gimmick right now. Much like VR. When you see it for the first time it’s mind blowing. But when you really sit down and you see and realize how far it needs to go before it’s practical, you kinda feel like it’s not worth it.

Like I said, the only card that can truly handle decent performance with ray tracing is a $1500 GPU. Even that card struggles to output good visuals at an acceptable frame rate and it needs DLSS to do it on games where real ray tracing is enabled.

Ray tracing is the future, no doubt. But it’s probably 3-4 years from being practical and can be done at a high performance level. It will get there. When it does, it will be glorious.

I guess I have to see it in real life with at least a 3070?

Models and shading look current gen for the most part, specially on humanoids.

Maybe the aesthetic is just turning me off.

Some of those gta mods or fake gta mods look much better to my eyes.

idk looks really good

@BlackShirt20: I don't see dlss as a problem. In some games it actually looks better than native. As someone who does ML as part of my job I gotta say I'm really excited about it - smart smart idea. I really view this as an alternate rendering pipeline - inserting an ML layer in to create detail. It's not "cheating" and if it's a way to get real time RT of good quality at playable framerates I just call that smart resource management.

@xantufrog: DLSS is fine. It’s just crazy to see a 3090 struggle to run Cyberpunk 2077 with ray tracing at 60fps unless it has DLSS on. No way AMD cards can do ray tracing on this game.