I was obsessed with real-time ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077, until playing it on an older laptop delivered a sorely needed slap to the face

The highly anticipated horror game Alan Wake 2 will arrive on October 27, just before Halloween, and NVIDIA is poised to make sure the newest title will make the most of the 40-Series RTX graphics cards. The game will offer the definitive day-one experience for GeForce RTX 40 Series players as frame rates will see an average multiplier of 4.5X at 4K resolution with DLSS 3.5. The jaw-dropping visuals are the perfect opportunity to showcase what the RTX 40 series can do, as 1440p resolution will garner an average increase of 3X framerates with full ray tracing at maximum settings and a 2.7X increase at 1080p. A full breakdown of specific card increases is below.

By Jon Porter, a reporter with five years of experience covering consumer tech releases, EU tech policy, online platforms, and mechanical keyboards.

While CD Projekt Red is sadly moving on from Cyberpunk 2077 to focus on the sequel, meaning we won't be getting any more expansions or significant updates, there's still a wee bit of polishing to do. Update 2.0 and Phantom Liberty arrived in a good state, but there's still some room for improvement, which is what patch 2.01 is focused on, squashing some bugs—including a particularly annoying one that's been around for years—and buffing the game's performance, particularly in Dogtown. 

Nvidia DLSS 3.5, the latest addition to team green’s upscaling suite, has brought us an exciting, new feature calling Ray Reconstruction. Until now, the implementation of Ray Reconstruction in Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 has been limited to the taxing RT Overdrive mode, something the majority of GPUs can’t manage. But a new hack promises to bring Ray Reconstruction to the masses.

Cyberpunk 2077 marks the end for CD Projekt's REDengine, the in-house technology that it's been building on since 2011's The Witcher 2. Last year, CD Projekt announced that its next Witcher game and other games going forward—including Cyberpunk's sequel, codename Orion—will be developed with Unreal Engine 5.

More Cyberpunk 2077 patch notes are on their way, developer CD Projekt Red announces. Following the arrival of the massive Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 patch overhauling many of the game’s systems, and the release of the Phantom Liberty DLC, Cyberpunk 2077 patch 2.01 is set to rectify some of the more common and troublesome issues found in the update.

Cyberpunk 2077's devs never considered abandoning the game despite its rocky launch in 2020.

On an old sticky note taped to a wall early on in Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty is a phone number you can call that will connect you with the past. Real Witcher heads should recognize the fuzzy music coming out of the phone instantly as the Witcher 3's main theme.

CD Projekt Red has always stuck by its games. The Witcher and The Witcher 2 both got massively improved Enhanced Editions about a year after launch, while The Witcher 3 more recently got its big next-gen update a full seven years later. But none of those games had the rough landing of Cyberpunk 2077's, which led to everything from staff departures to class action lawsuits. The list of things to fix was vast, and the list of things that could be improved was even longer. It seemed like at some point, CD Projekt would have to declare the game done, perfect or not, and move on—especially when the studio decided to switch its future projects to Unreal Engine 5, easing Cyberpunk's REDengine towards retirement.

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty officially drops today, and while Wccftech has covered the expansion’s PC technical chops, how does it measure up on current-gen consoles? Cyberpunk 2077 was originally kind of a mess on consoles, so it’s a question that begs answering. Thankfully, the folks at Digital Foundry have given Phantom Liberty and the recent Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 update for a spin, and the results are fairly good, although not without some drawbacks. You can check out Digital Foundry’s full video below, provided you have around 15 minutes to spare, or you can scroll on down for our recap.

SAG-AFTRA, the union representing actors, broadcast journalists, hosts, voice actors, and other media professionals in the US, has voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike against videogame companies including Activision, Electronic Arts, Epic Games, and Take-Two Interactive. The vote does not mean that a strike will be called, but the union hopes it will provide «added leverage» in its negotiations for a new Interactive Media Agreement.

Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 and the Phantom Liberty expansion on PC have introduced NVIDIA's DLSS 3.5, which consists of Ray Reconstruction, a new feature available to all GeForce RTX GPU owners to increase the fidelity of ray tracing when upscaling from a lower rendering resolution.