Cyberpunk 2077 might run great even without a next-gen GPU

(Image credit: CD Projekt Red)

Cyberpunk 2077 is shaping up to be one hell of a wild ride—our own Andy Kelly spent four hours in the game's massive open world and was left hungry for more. There's also a new trailer out, in case you haven't seen it already. But perhaps the best news is that Cyberpunk 2077 will support DLSS 2.0.

This is the second generation of Nvidia's Deep Learning Super Sampling technology, which uses artificial intelligence to upscale images. The promise of DLSS 2.0 is prettier graphics without the performance penalty that would normally come from running at a higher resolution.

We weren't super impressed with Nvidia's initial implementation of DLSS—enabling improved performance, but the expense of image quality in many cases. Our hands-on time with DLSS 2.0 left us with a far better impression of the technology. Jacob covered the nuts and bolts of DLSS 2.0 a few months ago, but summed up, he found it to be "an effective and immediate gateway to a gratuitous performance bump with little to no visual impact."

The caveat is support, and Nvidia partially addressed that with DLSS 2.0 as well, which no longer requires its AI network be trained on a per-game basis. Game-specific information still can be part of the equation, but it is no longer the only route.

I have to imagine that CD Projekt Red worked with Nvidia to train its AI specifically for Cyberpunk 2077, but either way, it supports DLSS 2.0. That's great news if you own a GeForce RTX graphics card, which is still required for DLSS.

Of course, it remains to be seen how demanding Cyberpunk 2077 ends up being on hardware overall. We also know that it is shipping with support for real-time ray tracing, a demanding technology in and of itself, and what we've seen so far looks gorgeous. With any luck, it will run great as well.

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Paul has been playing PC games and raking his knuckles on computer hardware since the Commodore 64. He does not have any tattoos, but thinks it would be cool to get one that reads LOAD"*",8,1. In his off time, he rides motorcycles and wrestles alligators (only one of those is true).