Cyberpunk 2077 might be getting support for “Real-Time Neural Radiance Caching for Path Tracing”

Cyberpunk 2077 with real-time radiance caching

According to CapFrameX, NVIDIA and CD Projekt Red might be working on implementing a new feature into Cyberpunk 2077. 

Cyberpunk 2077 had a rough start in 2020, but the development team has outdone themselves to fix the game and implement as many features as possible in a reasonably short time. While there are areas where the game may still require fixing, there is no doubt that Cyberpunk 2077 has been at the forefront when it comes to adding new graphics features.

The game launched ray tracing support which has now been updated to ‘full’ ray tracing with RT:Overdrive mode. Cyberpunk 2077 is also one of the few games to support all modern upscaling technologies: DLSS3, FSR2 and XeSS. It may appear that NVIDIA and CDP are working on adding another new feature, claims CapFrameX.

As stated by CapFrameX, the game may receive a new technology called Real-time Neural Radiance Caching for Path Tracing. This is a topic of a paper published by NVIDIA researchers in 2021.  In short, this is a method of replacing model pretraining with generalization via adaptation. What this means is that the model will not be pretrained for specific surfaces for where light sources bounce from but will adapt on the fly and will train while rendering.

This real-time caching for radiance can be used for path-traced global illumination that enables dynamic content prediction. This technology is compute-intensive and requires fixed hardware support like Tensor cores, but it does need as much memory as existing models.

Real-time Neural Radiance Caching for Path Tracing, Source: NVIDIA

Neither NVIDIA nor CD Projekt Red has confirmed that such technology might be coming to the game. It is stated that this technology could be added to the upcoming Phantom Liberty DLC, which is rumored to be released in June.

Source: CapFrameX, NVIDIA