Cyberpunk 2077 patch 1.2, ray tracing is a blow to AMD GPUs

In the past few hours Cyberpunk 2077 been updated to version 1.2, introducing not only a series of corrections for the flaws highlighted by the title on the different platforms, but also introducing the support for ray tracing by AMD video cards of the Radeon RX 6000 family. The update, weighing 34 GB, allows you to activate the effect not only as regards reflections, but also for shadows and above all in global and diffused lighting.

The title was developed from a technical point of view, and more particularly with regard to ray tracing, in symbiosis with Nvidia, which sees its logo on the start screen. No wonder then that the ability to enable ray tracing on AMD GPUs has only just arrived. Curious to understand the impact of technology on performance, we updated the game and installed the Radeon RX 6900 XT, current spearhead of the AMD offer. We also took the RTX 3090 and the RTX 3060, the two extremes of Nvidia’s Ampere offering (for now!). Here’s what we found:

The impact of ray tracing (tested with lighting on Ultra and the rest of the items by flipping to On) dramatic for AMD GPU performance. Going from 119 fps in Full HD without RTX to 38 fps is equivalent to a drop of 68% and with the other resolutions we are more or less on this value. The problem that AMD does not yet have a “DLSS-like” technology to safeguard the image quality and regain some of the lost performance, so it is clear that to obtain an adequate frame rate it is necessary turn off some ray-traced effects and / or reduce the detail of ray-traced lighting.

The RTX 3060 behind the RX 6900 XT with active ray tracing, but thanks to the DLSS (set to Quality, but there are various levels that allow you to further improve performance at the expense of image detail) passes in front of you clearly, especially in Full HD. The RTX 3090, as we see, close to the RX 6900 XT in the case of the test without ray tracing, while clearly ahead with the enabled technology and even further with the DLSS.

For Nvidia’s flagship, the impact of ray tracing can be quantified, at all resolutions, in a decrease of around 46%, much less than AMD’s proposal. In short, the existing performance gap in terms of ray tracing between AMD and Nvidia already seen on other titles is confirmed, in Cyberpunk perhaps even more marked to tell the truth: a lot depends on the type of ray tracing implemented in a game or on the concomitance of more effects.