In the latest issue of PC Gamer magazine, CD Projekt RED’s Artistic Director of Lighting Effects and FX, Jakub Knapik, illustrated the approach taken by the Polish developers to manage the lighting of Cyberpunk 2077 con Ray Tracing and techniques based on Global Illumination.
The developer of CD Projekt begins by stating that “We have implemented Ray Tracing in our graphics engine to make it work as a hybrid solution, which means that we can use it to replace some lighting systems with the corresponding version in Ray Tracing. For example, our Global Illumination system main uses the light coming from the sky, the sun and all positional light sources to dynamically produce the reflections “.
Always according to Knapik, the Cyberpunk 2077 graphics engine will use this approach to ensure maximum performance without relying exclusively on DXR techniques based on the tensor cores of NVIDIA GeForce RTX video cards: “In Ray Tracing mode, we use main global illumination only to produce the reflected light, while we use Ray Tracing to recreate the light coming from the sky and offer much better detail in lighting and shadows”.
For the launch of Cyberpunk 2077, scheduled for November 19, Ray Tracing will only be available on PCs with NVIDIA RTX GPUs. It is still unclear, therefore, whether real-time lighting will also come up GPU AMD and through theupdate nextgen di Cyberpunk 2077 for PS5 and Xbox Series X | S expected in 2021.
