At the end of March, we told you that overdrive mode would arrive in Cyberpunk 2077 on April 11 via a patch, and we explained the differences between this technology and ray tracing. There are still a few days left before it will be available in the said title, but NVIDIA He already shared a video where we can see it in actionand where we have the first performance test of the most powerful graphics card on the market today, the GeForce RTX 4090.

In the video, we can also see a graphical comparison between raster mode and overdrive mode, which one uses path tracing and which one significantly improves graphic editing. Activating Overdrive mode takes the quality of lighting to a completely different level, much more realistic, and the same goes for shadows, casts and reflections.

For ease of use of terms and to avoid confusion, NVIDIA also refers to this new mode as “full ray tracing”, a term that fits like a glove because when following the path a large number of light sources are used, This allows you to improve the quality and realism of lighting, shadows, reflections and caustics.

With this new mode, there is a very important technical leap, but as you can imagine, its impact on performance is also very large. When activating Overdrive mode the number of flash operations per pixel increased to a total of 635. For comparison purposes, in Battlefield V with ray tracing enabled, the total number of ray operations per pixel is only 39.

By having to work with more flashes, the load that the RT cores have to bear increases enormously, and this takes its toll even on the powerful GeForce RTX 4090, which, as we can see in the attached video, can only maintain the averages of between 16 and 27 FPS in 4K depending on each specific area, although it can reach 34 frames per second places where the graphic load is less. Thanks to DLSS 3, which includes intelligent image scaling and reconstruction and image generation technology, it is possible to reach a maximum of 138 FPS.

The improvement we have achieved in Cyberpunk 2077 in terms of performance is impressive and yes, it is true that enabling DLSS in performance mode results in a reduction in the number of pixels rendered in the traditional way, but the loss of image quality this represents is minimal, and of course it compensates by increasing the frame rate per second.

The truth is like this I am very curious to see what the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti can offer in this game with Overdrive mode. Seeing the results that NVIDIA has achieved with the GeForce 4090, and considering that the former does not support frame generation, I think it is likely that it will end up in the 30 or 40 FPS range in 4K and with DLSS. 2 in performance mode.