Cyberpunk 2077: Overdrive trailer blows fans away with its next-gen graphics

Cyberpunk 2077 may have released to bugs, glitches, and an immediately soiled reputation, but that’s thankfully not stopped the game from making a phenomenal comeback over the years since its release.

Thanks to a number of big updates, as well as the extra hype that the Netflix anime series, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners generated, Cyberpunk 2077 today is feels like a very different game to the one that released in December 2020. Fans are genuinely so excited about the upcoming Phantom Liberty expansion, and who can blame them? It stars Idris Elba, for crying out loud. Before that releases though, fans have a huge new update to look forward to - Overdrive Mode.

Take a look at the new trailer for Cyberpunk 2077’s Overdrive Mode below.

Overdrive Mode is coming to the PC version of Cyberpunk 2077 next week, and will add path tracing to the game - basically a better version of ray tracing which simulates light even better than before. While Night City was already an undeniably beautiful location, this new technology takes it up a notch - as TechEBlog reports, every source of light, from the billboards dotted around the city to the headlights from cars, will all be ray traced. All light sources will cast more accurate shadows, too.

Path tracing is a fairly new concept for video games - it’s usually used to create graphics for TV and film. However, NVIDIA, the software company behind the upcoming update, is hopeful that the feature’s addition to Cyberpunk 2077 could be the beginning of something huge for the video games industry.

“This not only gives better visuals to the players but also has the promise to revolutionise the entire pipeline of how games are being created,” Pawel Kozlowski, senior technology developer engineer at NVIDIA said in a recent blog post.

The update is totally free, and will be releasing on 11 April. However, you’ll need a pretty high-powered PC in order to run it - unsurprisingly, the mode requires some high specs to function. NVIDIA recommends that players use a GeForce RTX 40 Series GPU and NVIDIA DLSS 3.