Cyberpunk 2077 for release without ray tracing on AMD cards

After some uncertainty, it is now clear that ray tracing for the launch of Cyberpunk 2077 will not be supported on AMD cards. This has now been officially confirmed by an employee of CD Projekt Red within the framework of the new system requirements. According to this, raytracing will be available for Nvidia graphics cards only at launch. However, AMD is working on offering ray tracing options for AMD cards such as the RX 6800 XT as soon as possible. But there is no date for this yet.

Original announcement: Cyberpunk 2077 could support raytracing on AMD graphics cards already at the launch. This is indicated by the statements of Brian Burke (Nvidia PR Gaming Technology). Previously it was said that Cyberpunk 2077 would only support ray tracing on Nvidia graphics cards (PC Gamer via Gfinity).

The release of Cyberpunk 2077 was postponed by three weeks, from 19 November to 10 December.

In an interview with Wccftech, Burke spoke in general about raytracing or Nvidia RTX and in how many games the technology is really proprietary – i.e. not available as a public standard.

Only three RTX-only titles: the response is low. Only three titles require a special extension of the engine for ray tracing, which only works in combination with Nvidia graphics cards:

• Quake 2 RTX
• Wolfenstein: Youngblood
• JX Online 3

However, Burke stated that there was no intention to foreclose competitors in the case of the three games in question. However, the underlying Vulcan engine was not yet equipped with a raytracing extension at the time. Burke also stresses that Nvidia is very much interested in a growing raytracing ecosystem.

Raytracing with AMD graphics cards for the launch of Cyberpunk 2077?

When asked whether games that support Microsoft’s DirectX Ray tracing or DXR for short, also work with AMD graphics cards or real-time ray tracing, Burke answered as follows:

DirectX Ray Tracing is an API [Application Programming Interface] defined by Microsoft that can be implemented by any hardware manufacturer. Games created with DXR should work on any DXR-compatible GPU

Moreover, Nvidia cannot speak for other producers, it added. This is interesting because Burke clearly states that Cyberpunk 2077 uses DirectX ray tracing and therefore works with any DXR-capable graphics card – including AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 aka Big Navi.

However, this does not provide us with certainty. A corresponding inquiry from us to CD Projekt Red was answered with the following words:

The implementation of ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077 is based on the DirectX ray tracing (DXR) standard.

We have therefore also contacted AMD. As soon as we know more, we will update this article. In four weeks at the latest, at the launch of the game, we will definitely know more.