The release of Cyberpunk 2077's RT Overdrive upgrade sees a new level of visual fidelity brought to a modern triple-A game via path tracing - the purest form of ray tracing. However, the perception is that only RTX 40-series GPUs or best-of-the-best 30-series cards get to run these visuals, but what if I was to tell you it's easily possible to get a 1080p, 30 frames per second experience on the RTX 3050 - Nvidia's entry-level RT-capable desktop graphics card? It can be done - and this opens the door to all of the 20-series and 30-series cards I tested handing in a surprisingly good experience. Not only that, but higher-end AMD RDNA 2 and RDNA 3 graphics hardware is in the mix too.
I first got the idea of doing some kind of performance piece on RT Overdrive when I added some benchmarks to the RTX 4070 review. The 4070 with frame generation is capable of running the game in excess of 60 frames per second using a combination of DLSS 2 balanced mode and DLSS 3 frame generation - and it looks pretty good. We're already in playable frame-rate territory for the RTX 3080, but the 3070 is struggling. We have options though - reducing resolution, reducing DLSS quality level - but most intriguing of all, a mod has recently appeared that increases performance by anything from 20 to 35 percent in my testing. Right now, Intel is off the table unfortunately, likely down to driver issues, but Arc has great RT hardware and surely it's only a matter of time before these GPUs join the fray.
The mod is available here on Nexus Mods, created by Erok and Scorn, and I found that the extra performance it delivers combined with reasonable quality settings for the GPU you have makes the difference between an experience that bottoms out in the low 20fps area, to one that should consistently keep you above 30fps. From there, run either unlocked or use the game's in-built 30fps v-sync cap. A consistent frame-rate always looks good, but I have to caution you that the lag this introduces in Cyberpunk 2077 is pretty awful. Either way, I was highly surprised at how good the experience was. The mod mention 'almost free FPS', but there's no such thing as a free lunch when it comes to rendering, so what does it actually do?