Cyberpunk 2077 does not support ray tracing on AMD RX 6000 GPUs upon release
The PC version of Cyberpunk 2077 does not support ray tracing on AMD Radeon RX 6000 video cards at release. This is reported by the community lead of developer CD Projekt Red. The studio has partnered with AMD to add the feature ‘ASAP’ upon release.
CD Projekt Red released recently updated system requirements out for Cyberpunk 2077, which also lists the hardware requirements for ray tracing. Only GeForce RTX video cards from Nvidia are mentioned in that list. Community lead Marcin Momot reports thereby that RX 6000 video cards will not support ray tracing upon release on December 10. CD Projekt Red has teamed up with AMD to add the feature ‘ASAP’, Momot reports. It is not clear when this will happen.
Cyberpunk 2077 screenshots with ray tracing. Images via Nvidia
The reason why ray tracing in Cyberpunk does not initially work on AMD video cards is not stated. CD Projekt Red partnered with Nvidia to implement ray tracing, but it has not been confirmed that this is why ray tracing is not supported on AMD video cards at release. Other titles involving Nvidia, such as the recently released game Watch Dogs: Legion, already supported ray tracing on AMD’s graphics cards when it came out.
It is also possible that ray tracing in Cyberpunk is not yet fully optimized for AMD GPUs, as the ray tracing hardware differs from AMD and Nvidia. Cyberpunk 2077 will get after release a full upgrade for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S. This update should ensure that the game ‘makes full use of the next-gen hardware’. The new consoles are based on the same RDNA 2 architecture used in the Radeon RX 6000 video cards and also support ray tracing. CD Projekt Red does not mention an exact release date for the console upgrade.
Cyberpunk is not the first title with temporarily exclusive ray tracing based on the DXR API. Godfall only supports ray tracing on Radeon RX 6000 video cards at the time of writing. Raytracing on Nvidia GPUs will follow in a future update, the developer reports. AMD was also involved in the development of Godfall. Dirt 5, another game involving AMD, already supports ray tracing on video cards from both Nvidia and AMD.