Recently, CD Projekt Red's art director, Jakub Knapik, and the studio's main graphics programmer, Marcin Gollent, were interviewed by the German website PC Games Hardware. The purpose of the questions was to discuss some technical aspects of the game Cyberpunk 2077, which has its debut ever closer.
As expected, the topic that prevailed most during the chat was ray-tracing, where Jakub explained how the game works and the challenge of implementing technology in an open-world game like the one we have in Cyberpunk 2077. Check it out below CD Projekt Red employee said:
"In native mode, so with DXR features disabled, our engine is equipped with global lighting, so it supports reflected lighting independently of the platform. Our goal was to create a rendering platform that used PBR (Physically Based Rendering) rules. ) and a realistic approach to lighting across all platforms. This paradigm made ray tracing a natural extension of the idea, the next step in its evolution. We worked on a hybrid solution that builds on top of our existing setup, replacing some of our lighting subsystems by ray-traced equivalents. This gave us base parity, meaning we didn't need to create a separate lighting variant, and at the same time - a huge quality boost in some areas that we found most useful for Cyberpunk 2077, that we can further adjust to our needs.
We currently use Soft Sun Shadows, a solution that provides incredibly detailed results capable of capturing any object visible to the eye and simulating the natural phenomenon of softening shadows based on distance. We used a ray-traced skylight that works with our proprietary global lighting system, producing a super realistic environment coming from the sky and clouds. We also use emissive surfaces like screens and neutrons to emit smooth, realistic lighting with perfect shadows at night. In addition, and also obviously, we've enjoyed all the benefits of ray-traced ambient occlusion and are currently working on ray-traced reflections. As for the biggest benefits, I think they mostly come from the accuracy of 3D space ray tracing versus more traditional screen space solutions.
Overall, implementing ray tracing in the game engine on a practical level, with all the parity and care required for our in-engine systems, proved to be quite a challenge. That said, I think the difficulty is something that depends a lot on the case. Every engine is molded to meet specific needs. Our own was created to allow us to describe the incredible complexity of the Night City, with its vast verticality and massive amounts of assets across the city. All this with dynamic global lighting working in real-time with all local lights, a dynamic day and night cycle, and changing weather states."
In the preview version of Cyberpunk 2077 it was necessary to keep the Full HD resolution with NVIDIA DLSS 2.0 enabled, even with an RTX 2080Ti video card with 3 ray-tracing effects enabled. Maybe that's why the game has been delayed yet again and will now be released on November 19th. It is necessary to optimize the game in a way that is not demanding and that it is possible to run in 4K resolution with ray-tracing enabled.
A little later, during the interview, Marcin Gollent even stated that Cyberpunk 2077 will only run on DirectX 12. This means that the game will only be able to run on Windows 7 and Windows 10.
"Thanks to the introduction of DX12 support for Windows 7 SP1 released by Microsoft last year, the game will run on this system. We do and will continue to test Cyberpunk 2077 on Windows 7 in an attempt to resolve any edge cases that may arise. Unfortunately , Windows 8 did not receive its variant of DX12 libraries.
Regarding DX12 Ultimate, Cyberpunk 2077 will work flawlessly with all DX12 compatible GPUs. What the "Ultimate" feature set does is that we can do more if the hardware allows it. We chose to use DX12 for two main reasons. First and foremost, it's the default API for Xbox platforms, and with the game also coming to Xbox One, we naturally wanted to implement it as soon as possible. Second, it's the birthplace of DXR, and as we had plans to invest in DXR from the start, this made choosing DX12 pretty straightforward."
Cyberpunk 2077 will be released for Playsation 4, Xbox One and PC platforms. Its release will take place on the 19th of November. CD Projekt Red has already stated that it will make the game available for the PS5 and Xbox Series X.
