A few days ago NVIDIA started talking about Path Tracing in games, a much more visually appealing version of ray tracing, which obviously requires much more power. So much so that they decided to show this technique applied in a version of Cyberpunk 2077 Overdrive and that requires neither more nor less than an RTX 4090. Well, it seems that things are not as pretty as they painted a week ago.
We are very clear that there are a series of functions that NVIDIA has shown with regard to Path Tracing and that are carried out through computing shaders with CUDA that in the future RTX 50 of Blackwell architecture will be integrated in terms of hardware as speed accelerators. support or as characteristics of existing ones. More than anything to free the SM cores of the future chip from a series of tasks that for the moment have been presented more to show the brute force capacity of the RTX 4090 than anything else, but that show us that sometimes the know how to make brute force.
Cyberpunk 2077 Overdrive does not even go to 20 frames per second
And no, we’re not talking about running the game on a modest RTX 3060, but rather on an RTX 4090, the most powerful gaming graphics card NVIDIA has released so far. Well, despite its power alone, can not move the game even at 16 FPS. And what is this due to? What is done in Cyberpunk 2077 Overdrive is to change the generation part of the scene via classic Ray Tracing for Path Tracing, but with an additional addition. Not only indirect lighting is generated through the advanced trajectory ray tracing algorithm, but also direct lighting of the scene, leaving rasterization a smaller and smaller job.
The problem comes from the fact that for each pixel, on average, 635 intersections are made per ray, which by itself already stresses the RT Cores, which have a fixed rate in terms of the amount of work they can do. do per second Games like Battlefield V in its Ray Tracing mode have an average of 39 intersections per ray. We are talking about a game that was launched on the market at the same time as the RTX 20 and so far we have had that unit double its capacity in each generation.
For what Cyberpunk 2077 Overdrive requires to be minimally playable, the use of DLSS 3 to get playable FPS rates even on an RTX 4090, which makes it an experiment. Of course, there is no denying that it looks spectacular.
It’s too early to talk about Path Tracing in games
At the moment, Path Tracing is still something experimental in video games, but it is good that NVIDIA looks to the horizon to see the challenges that it will face at the hardware design level. As it happened with Ray Tracing, the best solution will not come from using raw power based on more cores and clock speed. The big leap in this regard was just made by the RTX 40 by going from using Samsung’s 8 nm to TSMC’s 4 nm. On the other hand, the jump to 3 nm will be less, which is why we are talking about the use of new support units to perform certain tasks in the future RTX 50.
