CD Projekt's Cyberpunk 2077 Update 2.0 + Phantom Liberty Expansion Thread

[Gargaune]

to whoever it might interest tested monowire against tech weapon feats and couldnt see much difference.
However, there is this cyberware that heals you when you hit enemy with fully charged tech weapon. That one works with monowire even when its not 100%. Paired with wire being aoe weapon it can heal you nicely.
Get poison feats, poison wire mod and you will be doing quite nicely. Bleeding feats could come into play against bosses i guess... not tested.

Ah, Cyberpunk 2077 build porn, featuring such prestigious perks as:

Killing an enemy using a yellow tech weapon that has the letter "n" in its name gives you a 7.34(6)% crit chance bonus on your next attack performed within 78 seconds on a target with ginger hair, but only if it's a leap year and it's raining outside. If the attack is a critical hit and you're standing on your head while clicking, each projectile deals an additional Xd6 lead poisoning damage, where X is the square root of the total number of dildos in a six metre radius.

Damn shame they took out the swimming perk, that pissed off a lot of min-maxers.

 

[Perkel]

Since i am rich now and got 3080 i decided to test the RTX stuff in C77. I finished game 3 times before on ultra on my 1080 that barely could hold 50-60fps at 1080p without RTX.

C77 with raytracing definitely hits quite different at times. At times you experience almost no change but on other times it is huge change. Every if you turn on Psycho which add ray traced Global illumination there is still probe based global illumination and raytracing GI can't edit that.

By far the biggest difference is in the highlights especially when there is huge area light source and how shadows behave. Here is good example:

This is ULTRA:

And this is RTX with all bells and whistles:

The first thing you can notice is complete lack of shadow. In raytraced one it grounds character. The second thing is lack of shadows coming from clothes. Black shirt is completely shadowless. In raytraced version of game there is distinct shadow that is created from part of jacket onto that black shirt.

Another scene:

This is the worst case scenario for standard restirization mode. Lot of objects that are lit from multiple sides with different amount of light level and via area lights. In this scene character is lit from the back which is correct but also receives yellow light from that light source in up left corner. Problem here is that sun is directional light source that has very limited ability to cast shadows otherwise it would murder performance while that orange light is just a point light.

The scene looks weird because there is distinct lack of correct shadows. The thing is weirdly lit and shadowed.

Now comes RT: Suddenly scene makes sense because shadows make sense.

Another scene. C77 cars have very intricate interior designs which look great.

Then you take RTX pill and you suddenly see that it lacked something. Self shadowing and actual GI from outside world:

Then again there are some scenes in which GI raytracing seems to not work at all and build in probe based GI takes over and you have weirdly lit character.

 

[Perkel]

Here is another good one. Interiors of cars seems to be places where raytracing "shines" the most.

In this interior everything looks ok, just like in any other game.

Then you add RTX and you sudenly see that original picture without RTX is quite different. Legs and floor is shadowed and wheel is in sun which makes wheel centerpiece of screenshot instead of being just part of it:

 

[Perkel]

Imho when it comes to raytracing it is not the reflections that are gamechanging but how scenes are properly shadowed. That is what gives depth to scene. The current rasterization methods are pretty good but you can clearly see where they fail. Human brain doesn't really care much about quality of reflection as long as they overall make stuff similar to what is supposed to be. On other hand it can easily see something is wrong with depth of image when shadows are wrong.

 

[tritosine2k]

Imho when it comes to raytracing it is not the reflections that are gamechanging but how scenes are properly shadowed. That is what gives depth to scene. The current rasterization methods are pretty good but you can clearly see where they fail.

nothing special and just as doable without RT, crytek did "per object" stuff like this for cutscenes all the time

Soft irregular shadow mapping: fast, high-quality, and robust soft shadows |

 

[Perkel]

nothing special and just as doable without RT, crytek did "per object" stuff like this for cutscenes all the time

Soft irregular shadow mapping: fast, high-quality, and robust soft shadows |

Per object shadows and self shadowing isn't really anything new, like you said crysis did it years ago.

What i am talking about is mostly penumbra and umbra. The shadows in this paper you quoted are made with point light which is why they are possible in restirization. The problem comes when light source is not point like object but has a volume. Area light it is called in rasterization but i don't really know any game that managed to get for those area lights proper "area shadows" They always produce point like source of shadow or no shadow at all.

 

[tritosine2k]

it's done, not a selling point, besides doing it on whole screen tanks perf regardless RT or:



so it's preferably a per-object technique still with scene wide stuff streamed in / precomputed.

 

[Bad Sector]

What i am talking about is mostly penumbra and umbra.

It is possible to have that without raytracing (and a bunch of games already have it), e.g. here is a screenshot of my engine from a year ago when i first added it:

However it has several drawbacks, main being that it only works with lights whose area can be expressed as a distance from the lightsource itself (e.g. sphere-shaped where the lightsource is a point light and the distance is the sphere's radius). And of course all the drawbacks it inherits from shadowmapping in general, like aliasing, peter panning, shadow acne, etc.

IMO while GI is nice, the biggest feature for raytracing is shadows that actually work without ghastly hacks on shadowmapping.

 

[Perkel]

yeah. If penubra and umbra were easy then games would already have it. It is not naturally so games don't have it.

Also making shadow correct is one thing. Making all shadows in scene correct is completely different matter.

Raytracing allows for shitload of dynamic lights with correct shadows it does have heavy impact on scene performance but even greater impact is when you have normal non raytraced lights trying to cast all correct shadows.

 

[Crispy]

For what it's worth, for every hand-picked screenshot you can post that shows a visual improvement using ray-traced shadows over rasterized ones in CP2077, I can show you a thousand screenshots that virtually look the same between the two (and I acknowledge that you already stipulated that on the last page).

The probem, currently, is that the tradeoff in situational visual improvement vs. in-game performance is far, far too large. To go from 120fps sustained with everything at Ultra other than RTX down to 75-80fps just by turning RTX on is unacceptable. I don't care how good the scene looks; for such a heavily action-based game, to me, you're defeating the purpose of the game by giving up such fluidity. There are certain areas of the game such as the central part of the Japanese area that can bring RTX down to 50fps using a 10900K and a 3090 at 1440p!

So your point is well-received, but unless you look at CP2077 as nothing but a screenshot maker, what's the point? You'll likely never really notice the visual improvements other than in rare situations, all the time wondering why there's microstutter and you're getting slightly motion sick playing the actual game.

 

[Yosharian]

For what it's worth the RTX in CP2077 looked more or less the same and not worth the FPS cost at all whereas when I tried it in Dying Light 2 (shit game) the difference was astounding and I couldn't play without it, the game still ran at over 100 FPS though which is a minimum for me

 

[Bad Sector]

yeah. If penubra and umbra were easy then games would already have it. It is not naturally so games don't have it..

But there are games that already have shadows with penumbras everywhere, e.g. GTA V and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. They aren't as easy to notice as raytracing's pixel perfect soft shadows because of overall shadowmap problems, but you do get that "contact hardening" effect that penumbras provide.

 

[Kjaska]

IMO the difference between RTX On and Off is very significant and worth the performance hit. It's not like the game is particularly difficult that you'd need the 120fps. Besides, the hardware is going to catch up eventually and you don't have to activate it until it does.

If it was some tech that required even more artists to create assets for the game, inflating the costs of production even further, I would be against it. But it's the opposite, potentially automating away a lot of manual work required for creating scenery.

 

[soulburner]

RT is still in its infancy. It brings back memories of GeForce 3 and pixel shaders. The early games used them sparingly and even then it was a big performance hit. At least two GPU generations went by before shaders became the norm and had no performance concern. Doom 3 was designed around the idea of shaders of the GeForce 3, but when the game was released it was pretty much unplayable on it.

So we've had two generations of RTX cards, one generation of RT capable Radeon cards. I believe RT might become less of a curiosity with the upcoming generation of GPUs that's coming later this year, but RT as a feature you see enabled by default in most games will happen no sooner than a year later. It will probably take years before full path tracing becomes anything else than a Quake 2 RTX you play for half an hour and forget about.

There is no doubt we can achieve great lighting and shadows with pure shaders and no hardware ray tracing. Unreal Engine 5's Lumen does pretty much everything without engaging hardware RT and looks absolutely marvelous, but I think we're close to crossing the line of what is feasible with "normal" rasterization (by becoming too complex and requiring too much raw horsepower) vs doing RT in hardware.

 

[Bad Sector]

If it was some tech that required even more artists to create assets for the game, inflating the costs of production even further, I would be against it. But it's the opposite, potentially automating away a lot of manual work required for creating scenery.

Indeed, raytracing simplifies a lot of things, from the visual perspective you get more accurate lighting and shadows and from the programming perspective you get a simpler rendering pipeline (no need for shadowmapping hacks). The hardware isn't at that point yet though, some hacks are still needed and we still only get to shoot a handful of rays, but raytracing is even more parallelization friendly than rasterization so performance is bound to boom in the future.

In addition it can enable some things that were hard or even impossible to do previously, e.g. better transparencies and -if/when the intersection tests themselves become programmable- volumes like smoke and water that aren't rendered as surface approximations (or as particle quads) but take depth and translucency into account and get properly shaded and cast and receive shadows.

 

[Perkel]

yeah i expect raytracing to pick up pretty quickly as hardware improves. The best thing about full raytracing pipeline is that it massively simplifies rendering. No need for hacks, no need for quadruple 360 hops around various problems, no need to build advanced math techniques to have just a taste of GI and so on.

I think the real test for raytracing will come with 4xxx of nvidia gpus. 3xxx improved raytracing only just a little bit performance wise while 4xxx should be where nvidia will change a thing a bit. There should be a lot of low hanging fruits at start of this process.

 

[gurugeorge]

Just as an amateur onlooker, it strikes me that raytracing is in an analogous position to what shaders were like in the first couple of Nvidia generations that had shaders - heavy load, more of a gimmick and not really worth it, games didn't implement it much, or didn't impement it well. But it eventually picked up to be ubiquitous and fantastic. I think the same will probably happen with raytracing.

 

[Bad Sector]

The best thing about full raytracing pipeline is that it massively simplifies rendering.

Well, we're still far from full raytracing pipelines, right now the GPUs aren't fast enough even for secondary effects without denoising and the rasterization functionality is still a large part of the GPU - meaning if it isn't used then the GPU's power isn't used to its fullest and the game would be leaving performance on the table.

I think it'll take a few generations for rasterization to take a back seat and even a bit more for it to be removed from the hardware (rasterization can be "emulated" in terms of raytracing) - consider that Nvidia GPUs even in the 4xx series (and most likely later too) still had dedicated hardware for fixed pipeline functionality even though theoretically that could have been implemented in shaders several generations before.

 

[soulburner]

Each new 3D technology is barely useful initially. Shaders tanked performance on a few generations of shader capable cards. So did tessellation. So will RT. And as with shaders and tessellation before, RT will soon become the norm.

The rumors and leaks suggest the new gen of GPUs will supposedly be ~100% faster in each price segment, but they're also completely silent about the RT aspect. It's worth to know that RT calculations are very memory bandwidth intensive. I recall reading an Nvidia paper about moving BVH calculations from the shader engine to a fixed pipeline hardware, which could be 2-3 times faster in theory, but it currently makes no sense because memory is not fast enough to offer a significant performance improvement, if any. So until we see graphic cards with GDDR7 I wouldn't count on a huge RT perf increase just yet.

 

[blessed king of longing]

Just as an amateur onlooker, it strikes me that raytracing is in an analogous position to what shaders were like in the first couple of Nvidia generations that had shaders - heavy load, more of a gimmick and not really worth it, games didn't implement it much, or didn't impement it well. But it eventually picked up to be ubiquitous and fantastic. I think the same will probably happen with raytracing.

that's generally been the trend with nvidia over the decades, rtx isn't an isolated thing in that

 

[Wunderbar]

The entire story of first expansion has been leaked.

It was accidentally added into game files with patch, now dataminer who found it after quarell with CDPR moderator leaked it. It was originally on r/ff06b5 subreddit, but now its deleted. You can find there every line and dialogue from first expansion.

https://www.mediafire.com/file/nzf1swld4io43or/ep1.7z/file

CDPR is the gift that keeps on giving.

 

[gurugeorge]

Christ, at this point I'm actually starting to feel sorry for them.

 

[Ibn Sina]

Summary of leak?

 

[lukaszek]

Summary of leak?

Spoiler

You portray Roszondas, who's just awakened from a decade of death with no memory of his past other than hazy recollections about fighting demons and the undead. However, in short order, you recall a lot about who you are, including your mission to defeat the evil forces invading the land of

Spoiler

Gorasul

and the special powers granted by your dragon stepfather, Crakan. These powers serve as an addition to the basic character stats. You're rated in dragon breath, dragon fear, dragon strength, and dragon eyes, and each can be adjusted with points awarded every time you advance a level. These attributes are of questionable value during the game, as they typically come into use only when Roszondas is in immediate peril. Whenever death approaches, he'll automatically use flame breath, a fear effect, or immense strength to fend off enemies.

 

[Ibn Sina]

Summary of leak?

Spoiler

You portray Roszondas, who's just awakened from a decade of death with no memory of his past other than hazy recollections about fighting demons and the undead. However, in short order, you recall a lot about who you are, including your mission to defeat the evil forces invading the land of

Spoiler

Gorasul

and the special powers granted by your dragon stepfather, Crakan. These powers serve as an addition to the basic character stats. You're rated in dragon breath, dragon fear, dragon strength, and dragon eyes, and each can be adjusted with points awarded every time you advance a level. These attributes are of questionable value during the game, as they typically come into use only when Roszondas is in immediate peril. Whenever death approaches, he'll automatically use flame breath, a fear effect, or immense strength to fend off enemies.

Sounds like an improvement in every way over the main story imo.