Cyberpunk 2077 Adding Ray Traced Reflections To Xbox Series X And PS5

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Malik Usman

At HI Digital I test and write about different hardware configurations to show other PC users what they can expect from their build. My end goal is to educate the masses to make the right decision when they are looking for new PC parts to buy

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Cyberpunk 2077 is gearing up for a massive overhaul with the upcoming Phantom Liberty expansion. In addition to massive AI and progression changes, the game will also get visual changes for the console version.

A new update will add a new ray tracing feature to both current-gen consoles, the Xbox Series X and PS5. Following the update, Cyberpunk 2077 will add support for ray-traced reflections on consoles.

Why it matters: Current-gen consoles already support ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077. However, this feature was limited to ray-traced shadows until recently.

Cyberpunk 2077 already looks spectacular on current-gen hardware. However, this change should provide even better visuals.

Currently, Cyberpunk 2077 uses ray-traced shadows and screen space reflections, providing a convincing look for reflective surfaces. However, this combination is still much worse than ray tracing.

Night City in Cyberpunk 2077 is filled with reflective surfaces. The new Phantom Liberty update will take advantage of these reflective surfaces through ray-traced reflections, giving a realistic look to the game world.

However, this addition will likely come at a cost to resolution. Following the update, the game can drop to 900p internal resolution in performance mode, and users should expect a similar impact to quality mode.

CDPR will continue to utilize dynamic resolution and FSR 2.0 to reduce the impact of lower internal resolution.

While options like ray-traced shadows are not very expensive on the GPU, ray-traced reflection can be very demanding. Therefore, it will be interesting to see how well the new options hold up on Xbox Series X and PS5.

Various games on consoles are already utilizing ray tracing extensively, and it looks like CDPR is joining the growing list of developers with significant ray-tracing options in games on the PS5 and Xbox Series X.

Malik Usman

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