Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty is, in accordance with our reviewer Graham, “maybe the perfect growth pack ever made.” Feh, small potatoes – Phantom Liberty’s most prestigious achievement is certainly the way it heralds a brand new ray tracing characteristic that makes Cyberpunk 2077 look and run a tiny bit higher. On particular settings. And solely on GeForce RTX graphics playing cards. The costlier ones.

Good day, then, to DLSS 3.5 and its Ray Reconstruction part. Like how DLSS improves visuals and efficiency with AI-aided upscaling and ant-aliasing, Ray Reconstruction injects some machine studying cleverness into the rendering of ray tracing. Nvidia say Ray Reconstruction cleans up artefacts and reduces the efficiency influence of RT results, and judging by the way it works in Cyberpunk 2077, I’d say they’re right – with the caveat that every one its enhancements are, in the end, modest.

For the foreseeable future, they’ll even be restricted to an exceptionally slim group of video games, and even to particular ray tracing settings inside these video games. To start out with, DLSS 3.5 will solely take pleasure in compatibility with video games which have full path tracing, which is a extra holistic however much more computationally costly evolution of the RT results you normally get in video games. As of writing, the listing of confirmed DLSS 3.5 video games solely extends to Cyberpunk 2077 (Phantom Liberty included), Portal with RTX, and Alan Wake 2, and what’s extra, you’ll have to activate path tracing in all of them to even unlock Ray Reconstruction as an possibility. It merely gained’t work with extra primary ray tracing, although Nvidia have recommended it might sooner or later.

The higher information, compatibility-wise, is that this isn’t one other DLSS 3 body era scenario the place you’ll particularly want an RTX 40 sequence GPU. Regardless of the three.5 model quantity, Ray Reconstruction can lean on a wider number of appropriate playing cards than DLSS 3, with each RTX-branded mannequin again to the 20 sequence theoretically able to enabling the brand new characteristic. Whether or not these older GPUs can even deal with path tracing is, after all, a special matter.

Fortunately, I needed to hand a pair that may, within the RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 3070. With freshly up to date drivers, Phantom Liberty dutifully put in on SSD, and Cyberpunk’s path-traced Overdrive mode engaged, I got down to see what a distinction Ray Reconstruction makes within the time-honoured {hardware} running a blog method: watching puddles.

In these explicit puddles, we will see a number of the extra putting benefits to Nvidia’s AI-fuelled redrawing. With Ray Reconstruction, the reflection of the wall is clearer and usually extra mirror-like, with the identical high quality seen on the bundle of weeds. With normal Overdrive path tracing, the reflection is blurred, as if out of focus. The sting of the larger puddle can also be extra sharply detailed, with a clearer indication of the place the dry tarmac ends and the water begins.

There’s extra common lighting element with Ray Reconstruction, too. Take a look at the little indents inside the yellow highway marking on the correct: they seem flat with normal lighting, however Ray Reconstruction provides depth and texture by having mild bounce off the vertical recesses.

On foot and up shut, lots of the variations stay minor, however they do exist. Once more, the reflection in that pooled water is extra detailed with Ray Reconstruction, and the sunshine emitting from the closest TV on the ground displays much less visible noise, which in flip helps preserve the feel of the carpet beneath.

Ray Reconstruction even seems to make path-traced reflections extra correct, in addition to sharper. When you click on and zoom in on this subsequent screenie, you’ll spot how the six-wheeled SUV rushing forward has a mirrored image that solely barely resembles itself; the entrance wheels don’t even seem related to the bottom. Flick on Ray Reconstruction and the subsequent automotive, when it reaches the identical place, is far more faithfully mirrored. The moist floor impact usually appears to be like nicer as properly.

Sticking with the reflections-of-cars theme, these can mysteriously vanish with vanilla Overdrive settings – take a look at the automotive simply on the correct there. Ray Reconstruction restores them, which I’m pretty certain is all the way down to how DLSS attracts pixel information from earlier frames to the touch up new ones. Quick-moving objects can confuse ray tracing methods, however Ray Reconstruction advantages from feeding itself that further information, preserving the simulation extra correct.

It’s onerous to seize with screenshots, and doubtless with even a flippantly compressed video embed, however I additionally seen Cyberpunk 2077 simply seemed a teeny, tiny bit sharper in movement when Ray Reconstruction was switched on. That may very well be one other constructive impact of DLSS 3.5 changing the usual denoising algorithms, which take away a lot of the fuzziness that ray tracing creates, however can overwhelm sure color information within the course of – dulling the perimeters of objects. I disabled movement blur whereas capturing all of this picture proof, however with Ray Reconstruction, it was like cleansing away a small vestige of movement blur that I hadn’t beforehand seen.

As for the promised efficiency enhance, I usually noticed smaller positive aspects than Nvidia’s DLSS 3.5 advertising and marketing JPEGs recommended. Nonetheless, they have been positive aspects. In Cyberpunk 2077’s built-in benchmark device, my RTX 4070 Ti averaged 95fps at 1440p with Overdrive mode, Balanced DLSS upscaling, and DLSS body era enabled. The addition of Ray Reconstruction noticed that creep as much as 99fps, so it’s a fabric rise even when it’s not one you’d instantly discover. These outcomes held up in-game as properly: I repeated a jog round Phantom Liberty’s new Dogtown district with the identical settings, averaging 95fps with Ray Reconstruction and 90fps with out.

Overdrive at 1440p is a bit a lot for the RTX 3070, so for this GPU I dropped to 1080p, preserving Balanced DLSS upscaling however unavoidably dropping body era. Again within the benchmark, this setup averaged 51fps with Ray Reconstruction off, and 54fps with it on.

Clearly, these aren’t night-and-day variations, and neither are the visible enhancements (except you habitually glare at rugs or the underside of automobiles. I’m not your dad). However even when it’s to merely dinky extents, the very fact is that DLSS 3.5 and Ray Reconstruction efficiently upgrades constancy and efficiency. Concurrently, and with no readily obvious downside outdoors of the slim sport and GPU help.

These are efficient enthusiasm dampeners, little doubt, however I’d somewhat have a very good PC characteristic that solely works in three video games over a crap one which works in three thousand. If Nvidia can get Ray Reconstruction up and working with out the necessity for full path tracing, it may very well be another excuse to make your subsequent graphics card improve an RTX.