Ray Tracing in Cyberpunk 2077 Initially Only on Nvidia Cards

Artur Knapik from CD Projekt RED announced in a press interview that on day one ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077 will be available only for Nvidia GPU owners.

IN A NUTSHELL:

Ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077 will initially only be available on Nvidia GeForce RTX 20XX and 30XX series cards;
The feature will also work on the GeForce NOW streaming platform;
AMD Radeon RX 6000 and next-gen consoles (also based on AMD's hardware) are likely to receive support for ray tracing later.

CD Projekt RED's developer Artur Knapik confirmed in an interview published in the latest issue of PC Gamer magazine (via Wccftech) that on the day of launch, ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077 will only be enabled on PCs equipped with a Nvidia graphics card (of course, we are talking about GeForce RTX 20XX or 30XX series) or on the GeForce NOW platform. The feature will not be supported initially on AMD's hardware. We also learned a few details about its implementation.

"We implemented ray tracing into our engine to work as a hybrid solution, meaning that we can replace certain systems with its ray-traced version. For example, our core Global Illumination system uses light that comes from the sky, sun, and all location light sources to dynamically produce bounce light. In ray tracing mode, we use our main GI to produce only the bounced light, while the main light that comes from the sky is ray-traced, giving it much better shaping and details in shadows," we read in the interview.

The lack of ray tracing support on AMD hardware can be somewhat disappointing for those planning to purchase a chipset from the upcoming Radeon RX 6000 family, as well as future owners of next-gen consoles that also rely on the company's technology. However, in fact, the situation is quite understandable - there is no AMD GPU on the market for the time being that would offer hardware support of ray tracing, so it is difficult to ensure proper implementation of this solution on such chipsets (not to mention that for the same reason it is not a priority).

It is worth noting that this does not mean that ray tracing on AMD hardware will not be supported in the future - on the contrary, we can be almost certain that it will happen. In the past, CD Projekt RED informed that it plans to release a patch that will allow CP2077 to use the full potential of next-gen consoles, and it seems quite likely that ray tracing will become part of this update.