Get CyberPunked With Radeon Ray Tracing

Just Because You Can Do Something …

Cyberpunk 2077 Patch 1.2 has arrived and with it Ray Tracing support for AMD’s RX 6000 series has been added, allowing Radeon users to switch on Reflection, Shadow, and Lighting Ray Tracing.  The FPS Review fired up an RX 6800 XT, to see how it fares against the GeForce RTX 3080 FE as well as to check in on any change in NVIDIA’s Ray Tracing support.  You might get your hopes up because of the RX 6800 XT’s superior performance without Ray Tracing; you should not.

There is no doubt that the game does support Ray Tracing without RT cores however the side effects are serious enough you might want to avoid it.  They tested performance at 1080p and 1440p with both Ray Tracing Medium which enables shadows and sets lighting to medium as well as Ray Tracing Ultra which enables reflections, and sets both shadows and lighting to ultra.  They included 4K results as well, but there isn’t any hardware which can handle that resolution without serious drops in performance or in quality.

In all of these tests Resizable BAR and AMD Smart Access Memory were enabled on the test system.  At 1080p on Ultra the RX 6800 XT dropped from 115.6fps to 38.4fps, at 1440p it plummets from 78.4fps to 25.8fps, neither of which are particularly enjoyable to play.  If you limit yourself to Medium, 1080p will give you a somewhat playable 51.1fps but up that to 1440p and you are back to 35fps.   In contrast an RTX 3080 will give you 65.1fps on Ultra at 1080p and 42.9fps at 1440p so even those mighty RT cores struggle with this game’s full power.

If you are set on trying it out, your best bet is 1080p with only one feature enabled.  Enabling only Shadows will give you a decent ~50fps experience, Reflections will be painful at ~40fps and Lighting will drop you to about 30fps.  Hardware optimization beats software once again.