Cyberpunk 2077 Ray Tracing Will Be Exclusive To Nvidia At Launch

Even though it might be just as difficult to find stock, AMD's new RX 6800 and RX 6800XT graphics cards offer come competition to Nvidia's latest offerings. But if you're planning to pick up a new GPU specifically for Cyberpunk 2077, you might want to stick to the Nvidia for now. (You can read about the game itself in our Cyberpunk 2077 review.)

CD Projekt Red has revealed that Cyberpunk 2077 will not support any ray tracing on AMD GPUs when the game launches on December 10. Responding to a query about requirements for AMD cards, community lead Marcin Momot explained that support will come post-launch.

"Not for the release but we are working together with AMD to introduce this feature as soon as we can," Momot replied.

Cyberpunk 2077 and its many ray tracing features have always been advertised with Nvidia-specific features and support which might make the exclusion a bit easier to explain. It's also not the only recent game to make ray tracing exclusive to certain hardware, with Godfall launching with ray tracing support only for new AMD GPUs.

Ray tracing is one workload where AMDs new cards suffer a bit though. In our AMD RX 6800XT review it's clear that the new RDNA 2-powered cards trade blows with Nvidia in regular workloads, but Nvidia's dedicated RT cores make a huge difference for ray tracing performance. RDNA 2 is AMD's first attempt at ray tracing-capable hardware, while Nvidia's new 30-series cards are building on a two-year-old foundation.

For more on Cyberpunk 2077, check out the latest gameplay trailer from the last Night City Wire stream before launch, as well as our extensive hands-on preview.