Cyberpunk 2077 Ray Tracing will work on any GPU

While Cyberpunk 2077 may have been used in Nvidia’s promotional videos to praise Ray Tracing as an exclusive RTX advantage on this game, in reality we learn that ray tracing on this game will therefore not be exclusive to Nvidia and its GeForce RTX series.

The reason becomes obvious and is in line with our remarks on AMD’s strategy and its willingness to rely, both on ray tracing and on an equivalent to DLSS and on Microsoft tools. This choice by Microsoft will allow the studios to make the most of their development time by avoiding multiplying versions. Without denigrating the qualities of the Nvidia API, which has been pushing ray tracing for many months, it is undoubtedly much more interesting to develop one’s game based on an open standard accessible by both the owner of a latest-generation console, a recent AMD graphics card and, of course, users with a Nvidia GPU.

“Cyberpunk 2077 uses the industry standard API: DirectX Ray Tracing. It will run on any DXR compatible GPU. Nothing about Ray Tracing on Cyberpunk 2077 is the property of Nvidia.” Brian Burke, NVIDIA PR Gaming Technology, Esports & Consumer VR.

According to Burke, most current Ray Tracing games use DXR. However, there are three exceptions that use NVIDIA’s Ray Tracing extension for Vulkan. These exceptions are Quake II RTX, Wolfenstein: Youngblood and JX3. Crysis Remastered also uses NVIDIA’s VKRay Vulkan extension for RTX GPUs. However, Crytek has only used this extension to improve RT performance on RTX GPUs. Thus, Crysis Remastered’s Ray Tracing effects work on both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs.

Finally, it’s no secret, but nothing prevents a GPU that doesn’t offer hardware acceleration from taking advantage of the DXR API and displaying, obviously depending on its performance level, ray tracing effects in a game.