NVIDIA GeForce vs AMD Radeon GPUs For Cyberpunk 2077
Cyberpunk 2077 fans saw breakthroughs within the game as the whole new “hyperrealism” fad took shape in late 2023. A series of videos began hitting YouTube, showcasing Night City in 8K with photorealistic environments, lifelike shading and cars that were so perfectly rendered that you’d swear it was real.
You can’t comprehend what you’re looking at. How was Cyberpunk 2077 so heavily modded that it became indistinguishable from real life footage? Or is this just some kind of project the Youtuber created with Adobe AfterEffects?
The answer would surprise you — this effect can be achieved with only a couple free mods and a few toggles turned on in the graphics settings menu.
Is there a catch? Unfortunately, yes — and owners of AMD Radeon cards are going to be upset to know that they will not be able to achieve this effect.
For the record, I shelled out $1,020 for an XFX Speedster Merc 310 AMD Radeon 7900 XTX Black Edition last year — a decision I made over the NVIDIA GeForce RTX series, namely the 4080 Super.
According to many reviews I’ve read from numerous tech review sites, the two cards are direct competitors with one outperforming the other here and there in various head-to-head benchmarks. Conclusively, there was a better price on the Radeon at the time and I figured that both cards were practically identical aside from a bunch of nerd fanboy rants, so, go with the cheaper one. Why not, right?
Read on to learn why this was a huge mistake.
A Quick 101 on Today’s GPU Technologies
Before we jump in to a bunch of facts and current issues with AMD, let’s quickly review these need-to-know attributes of the graphics card world.
What Is Ray Tracing?
Ray tracing is a rendering technique that simulates the way light interacts with a scene. It calculates how light hits objects, and follows through by rendering accurate representations of other things like reflections, shadows, indirect light and other effects related to light sources that you see in real life.
So, if you’re in Night City and walk around a car under a street light, you’ll notice how street light bounces off of the car’s surface differently, morphing and changing as you walk around the car. Also, you’ll notice how a nearby neon light also strikes the car, hitting it with its colorful glow and changing with the viewing angle.
Ray Tracing can be thought of as an evolution from the former standard, “rasterization based rendering,” which can be thought of as a single set of rays stopping on the first thing they come in contact with.
What is Path Tracing?
A more intricate form of ray tracing known as “path tracing” is a rendering technique that takes light reflections much further, beyond that of ray tracing.
Taking our previous example about the car under a street light in Night City, add to that example by considering that the street light is also brightly gleaming on a nearby shop window. The gleam of the street light in the shop window will now also cast its own reflective light on the car (on top of all the other rays of light that are already hitting the car). That’s Path Tracing. It’s basically Ray Tracing on steroids.
Both AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce have path tracing options with the flip of a toggle in the graphics settings menu.
Path tracing comes with a severe performance hit. Unless you’re just looking to capture still shots, you’ll probably be playing with ray tracing instead. Even then, strangely enough, you might not even notice much of a visual difference with path tracing on or off depending on the scene you’re looking at. AMD users can expect to see severe ghosting effects with path tracing enabled, especially while observing cars moving in traffic.
What is Upscaling?
Upscaling renders games at a lower resolution and then scales them up to match your monitor’s native resolution, while using algorithms to enhance image quality and reduce artifacts.
NVIDIA’s DLSS upscales with the help of AI — the absolute most advanced method to get this task done — while AMD Radeon only uses traditional algorithms.
What is Ray Reconstruction?
Ray reconstruction is a new technology introduced in DLSS 3.5 that generates higher quality images through enhanced AI learning.
Ray reconstruction’s end result is visible in dramatically sharper reflections, better dynamic lighting, vastly improved performance and also responsiveness. It is only available for NVIDIA RTX-series card owners. AMD Radeon GPUs do not offer this feature at all.
Is There A Cost Associated With Achieving This Effect?
Numerous YouTube channels showcasing Cyberpunk hyperrealism are funneling you to the author’s Patreon site, where they advertise a monthly fee to download the files needed to achieve the effect.
I’ve said this before: don’t spend a cent on this — you can either do it for free yourself, or download it for free somewhere else.
Without getting into the weeds here, be sure to check out my other detailed article about Cyberpunk hyperrealism if you’re interested in taking this path.
Why I Failed to Get Hyperrealism In Cyberpunk 2077
With my new Radeon 7900 XTX, I was able to hit all the toggles in the Cyberpunk graphics settings menu to High and even Ultra, resulting in a crisp looking game that had no visible stuttering at all. However, it looked nothing like those hyper realism videos we’ve all seen on YouTube. Something big was missing.
I downloaded a bunch of mods, namely Nova LUT, ReShade, and tried a few weather mods. Same result. I then set all ray tracing settings to their highest amounts, and even swapped it with path tracing just for the hell of it. No difference.
Huge WTF moment. Why is my expensive Radeon card not loading up a game that looks anything like the 4K real life video footage that I crave? After all, both GeForce and Ryzen cards support ray tracing…so, what’s the problem? What’s the missing link to make that “jump” to hyper realism?
In short, I learned that it’s the exclusion of Ray Reconstruction, something that only GeForce RTX-series card owners will get.
I’ve been building PCs since the 1990s, and GPU selection involved nothing more than looking at a bunch of performance charts and price comparisons, then making a decision based on those results. Those days have changed forever, as these stats have become only part of the big picture when choosing a GPU.
DLSS, Ray Reconstruction, De-Noisers and Creating the “Realism” Leap
There’s a simple answer to how Nvidia has provided their customers with the ability to simply “switch on” hyper realism like a light (maybe with a plugin or two to enhance color palette, lighting, and an ini file to set rays and bounces), and that answer is its AI-powered DLSS, or “Deep Learning Super Sampling.”
Found in their RTX-series cards, DLSS is one of the more groundbreaking technologies you may have heard of that is a proprietary technology of Nvidia.
It achieves better speed and image quality using AI powered by tensor cores, blending both super sampling and anti-aliasing techniques. Its AI system keeps learning better ways to improve frame generation and dramatically increase rendering speed without affecting image quality in any visible way.
DLSS 3.5 Takes Everything To A New Level
The next iteration of DLSS — 3.5 — gives both super resolution and ray reconstruction to its RTX users. With 3.5, AI is trained on 5x more data than in version 3.0. In turn, it’s smarter and uses more data and more optimization for upscaling.
Its AI is smarter than, and takes the place of multiple de-noisers. This is what creates a more realistic image that has more depth and accuracy.
DLSS 3.5 also provides NVIDIA GPU owners with a massive FPS boost. According to NVIDIA, this provides nearly an 80% increase of FPS with full ray tracing. At the moment, AMD Ryzen owners will have no FPS boost whatsoever.
AMD Gets Left Behind, Again
Hard Truths for AMD Ryzen Owners
In Cyberpunk 2077, AMD Ryzen gamers will naturally have all DLSS options ghosted out of their graphics settings menu (obviously, because it’s NVIDIA proprietary tech), and their only best upscaling option will be “Intel XeSS.”
I’m not bashing the AMD or Intel XeSS technologies themselves — your Cyberpunk 2077 will look great, but it won’t make that leap to the next level.
AMD makes great GPUs, but as a company, they are playing a never-ending game of catch-up with NVIDIA who is completely on the ball with their collabs and integrations with the hottest games that come out.
The Endless Wait for AMD’s FSR 3
FSR or “FidelityFX Super Resolution” is AMD’s own version of DLSS. Ironically, FSR is open source and cross-platform, so even NVIDIA GPUs can use it. Unlike DLSS, FSR does not use AI technology.
While Ryzen cards have their own answer to framerate optimization in the current FSR 3 version, that technology is not supported by Cyberpunk 2077 and has been listed as a “coming soon” feature for many months now, with no updates or any word of a release date.
Do a Google search and you’ll undoubtedly see posts on Reddit and CDPR forums with angry AMD’ers asking what’s happening, if anything, with FSR 3 coming to the game.
Waiting for FSR 3 to come feels much like waiting for the next Elder Scrolls game.
AMD’s own website lists Cyberpunk 2077 as one of the games that will receive support for its technology, although that advertisement has been sitting there for months.
So, Will My Ryzen GPU Ever Be Able to Achieve This Effect?
Long story short — no. AMD owners will never see the hyper-realism effect unless there’s some point in the future where AMD catches up with NVIDIA and implements their own tensor cores, AI and ray reconstruction features in a future GPU.
Let’s Recap: The Current Situation Of Nvidia vs. AMD in Cyberpunk
- NVIDIA directly supports Cyberpunk 2077 with its technology, AMD doesn’t.
- NVIDIA’s DLSS uses AI to constantly improve itself, AMD doesn’t use AI at all.
- NVIDIA RTX-series owners get ray reconstruction, AMD owners don’t.
- DLSS is the most common upscaling technique for PCs, FSR is the most common for…er…consoles.
- NVIDIA DLSS provides a dramatic FPS boost for its users, AMD doesn’t offer this at all.
- AMD FSR is inferior to NVIDIA DLSS because it is purely algorithm-based, vs. AI based.
- NVIDIA GPUs can use AMD FSR technology, but AMD GPUs cannot use NVIDIA DLSS technology.
What Aspects Help Achieve the Hyperrealistic Look?
After watching, pausing and taking notes from dozens of videos, this is my list of what contributes to the visual effect:
- The sky: Quite simply, the sky should match up with the brightness, color palette and saturation level of everything down below. Anything contrary to this will break the illusion.
- Blur & bokeh: Motion blur is something that the hyperrealism videos seem to always leave “on.” It almost subconsciously adds to the realism of a scene, even though it might not be ideal for gameplay. Even if you don’t notice it, you experience motion blur all day every day in real life as you look around quickly. As for bokeh, the true bokeh effect is only something that ReShade can add to the game, and when a foreground object is more crisp than everything behind it, and the distance is gradually more blurry the further it is from your line of sight, the more realistic everything looks, plain and simple. A subtle, properly calibrated blur brings out the fine details even more — it’s part of an optical illusion.
- Proper desaturation: Mods such as a LUT or a well-configured ReShade can help tone down the oversaturated objects in the game. I always felt Cyberpunk had a lot of green and red in it, and most areas of the game kind of feel like the air itself is yellow tinted. Once you tone those colors down with desaturation, everything bleaches out a bit more and looks like it should in real life. Couple this with the sky, and you get an all-around accurate top-down representation of color.
- Textures: 4K textures make a world of a difference. One of the things that makes an otherwise real looking scene look fake are muddy, pixelated textures. Once you install a mod like HD Reworked Project, the difference is undeniable.
- Lighting: The way light is represented in the way it bounces off surfaces, puddles and everything else will tie in to the overall “view of the world as it should be.” When your eyes see examples of light playing the way it should, it contributes greatly to realism. The same goes for accurate shadows and the way they appear as a result from multiple light sources, and the lights that bounce off of the surfaces from those sources, if that makes sense.
- The thing that cannot be described easily: Here’s the final part, and possibly the most important one that only NVIDIA’s technology brings to the table. There’s just something about the way NVIDIA RTX renders and de-noises the final image, where, for example, the edge of a car looks soft against the pavement, vs. the entire vehicle looking extremely crisp and just appearing like a 3D rendered object in a video game. There’s no real way to explain this, but it’s truly the missing link that RTX cards materialize into this game. It’s the AI at work, stitching everything together on a constant basis, and it really makes the difference.
2 Reasons to Choose Nvidia over AMD
- For their superior AI + ray reconstruction technology
- For the company’s cooperation with the gaming industry
NVIDIA directly supports Cyberpunk 2077 with their technology. That’s why you see the RTX logo everywhere on official Cyberpunk 2077 media stills. If you do a little digging, you’ll see how this is a repeat incident with many other popular releases. It’s the cat and mouse game where NVIDIA has a knack for getting their foot into the gaming community while AMD has to play catch up…when they eventually get around to it.
You’re choosing NVIDIA not only for their superior technology, but for their level of direct support and integration with these games. Yes, benchmarks between the two companies can look identical, or in some cases, AMD looks superior, but when you start doing research on Nvidia’s tensor cores and AI technology, you’ll begin to see that AMD is years behind.
That’s not to say that AMD Ryzen owners won’t see a beautifully detailed, well-performing game. If your card exceeds the requirements, you’ll have a great experience. However, when it comes to things like hyper realism and immersion, you simply will not be able to make that visual jump from a game that looks like a high-detailed Grand Theft Auto V install, to one that literally looks like real life video footage.
As for me and my Radeon RX 7900 XTX — sad to say — if I could have done it all over again, I would have gladly coughed up a few hundred more for the NVIDIA RTX 4080 Super, with the RTX 4090 being a distant dream (*ahem* price tag of $1,700+).
I realize I may be sounding like an NVIDIA shill at this point. Truthfully, I wish I had done this research about $1,000 ago. This was all a valuable learning experience with the unfortunate consequence of buyer’s remorse.
I’ve never been an Nvidia fanboy in the nearly 30 years I’ve been building PCs, but that has now changed.
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