CD Projekt RED continues to work on Phantom Liberty, the first and only DLC that Cyberpunk 2077 will receive, and that will be exclusive to this generation of consoles and PC. This has generated a lot of interest because there is the possibility that it will introduce major improvements on the base game , and that in many ways it will be what the original game should have been from the beginning (if it had not been conceived as an intergenerational transition title).
We still don’t have much information in this regard, but an interesting rumor , which makes a lot of sense, all told, ensures that CD Projekt RED is going to incorporate “Real-Time Neural Radiance Caching” technology into this new DLC for Cyberpunk 2077, and Thanks to it, performance will be significantly improved by activating path tracing , also known in Spanish as tracing roads or tracing routes.
If you wonder what this technology consists of, don’t worry, we are not going to leave you wondering. It is basically an intelligent caching model that starts from a general work system through adaptation, that is, it does not have a base supported by previous training, but rather learns and adapts in real time to the lighting and rebounds that it generates on each surface, which means that you train as you go.
It goes without saying that, to be able to use a model as advanced as this one, it is necessary to have dedicated hardware to accelerate all the workload it represents, and in this case the most responsible would be the tensor cores . By this I mean that a graphics card without tensor cores could not use “Real-Time Neural Radiance Caching”, and that therefore we will need a GeForce RTX, although I do not know it will be limited to a specific generation for power reasons.
Now that the arrival of path tracing in Cyberpunk 2077 with the Overdrive mode is a reality , it is necessary to continue optimizing to improve performance , since this new mode is extremely demanding, and we need a very powerful graphics card to be able to apply it without the rate of frames per second to sink completely.
We can offset the performance hit with DLSS 2 and DLSS 3 , and it should be noted that in the GeForce RTX 40 series SER technology helps too, but even with all this on the table there is still room for improvement, and optimization it’s key for path tracing to become truly viable in games beyond Cyberpunk 2077. “Real-Time Neural Radiance Caching” would be a step in the right direction towards further optimization.