Update from November 21: After a long period of uncertainty, it is now clear that ray tracing will not be supported on AMD cards for the launch of Cyberpunk 2077. An employee from CD Projekt Red has now officially confirmed this as part of the new system requirements. Accordingly, ray tracing will only be available for Nvidia graphics cards right from the start. But they are working with AMD to offer raytracing options for AMD cards such as the RX 6800 XT as soon as possible. However, there is no date for this yet.
Original message: Cyberpunk 2077 could support ray tracing at the launch on AMD graphics cards. This is what statements from Brian Burke (Nvidia PR Gaming Technology) suggest. Previously it was said that Cyberpunk 2077 would only support ray tracing on graphics cards from Nvidia for release (PC Gamer via Gfinity).
By the way, the release of Cyberpunk 2077 has been postponed by three weeks, from November 19th to December 10th. You can find out more about the background in this article:
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PC and next gen aren’t the problem
Im Interview with Wccftech Burke said in general about ray tracing or Nvidia RTX and in how many games the technology is really proprietary – i.e. not available as a public standard.
Only three pure RTX titles: The answer to this is low. Only three titles therefore need a special engine extension for ray tracing, which only works in conjunction with graphics cards from Nvidia:
According to Burke’s statement, in the case of the three games mentioned, the intention is not to exclude the competition. Only the underlying Vulkan engine was not yet equipped with a ray tracing extension at the time. Burke also emphasizes that Nvidia is very much interested in a growing ray tracing ecosystem.
Do you want to know what RTX and the most important terms around ray tracing mean? Then we recommend the following articles:
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What does RTX mean?
Ray tracing with AMD graphics cards for the launch of Cyberpunk 2077?
When asked whether games that support Microsoft’s DirectX ray tracing, or DXR for short, also work with AMD graphics cards or real-time ray tracing, Burke answered as follows:
“DirectX Ray Tracing is an API defined by Microsoft [Programmierschnittstelle]that can be implemented by any hardware manufacturer. Games made with DXR should work on any DXR-compatible GPU. “
In addition, Nvidia could not speak for other manufacturersit continues. This is interesting because Burke clearly communicated in the further course that Cyberpunk 2077 uses DirectX ray tracing and thus works in principle with any DXR-capable graphics card – including AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 alias Big Navi.
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AMD Big Navi presented
But that doesn’t give us any certainty. A corresponding request from us to CD Projekt Red was answered with the following words:
“The implementation of ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077 is based on the DirectX ray tracing (DXR) standard.”
We therefore also asked AMD. As soon as we know more, we’ll update this article. In four weeks at the latest, when the game is launched, we will definitely know more.
