Cyberpunk 2077

is without doubt one of the biggest ray tracing games that’s ever been released on PC, and it should come as no surprise that it’s also one of the most demanding. Like Metro Exodus before it, CD Projekt Red have gone all in on this ultra-realistic lighting technology to make Night City look and feel like a living, breathing city, using everything from ray traced reflections and shadows to three separate ray traced illumination techniques. Indeed, if you’ve been searching for an excuse to show off your new Nvidia RTX card, this is definitely the game you’ve been waiting for. Or is it? Night City can look spectacular with all of its ray traced bells and whistles switched on, but only a select few GPUs are really capable of depicting this futuristic cityscape at playable frame rates.

To help you get the best ray tracing performance, I’ve put together this handy guide, showing you what the game’s ray tracing looks like in the flesh compared to its regular non-ray traced quality settings, as well as what kind of performance you can expect to see at 1080p, 1440p and 4K across almost every Nvidia RTX card that’s available today, from the entry-level RTX 2060 all the way up to the brand-new RTX 3080. Regardless of whether you’re an existing RTX owner or are looking to upgrade once hardware prices settle down again, here’s everything you need to know about Cyberpunk 2077’s ray tracing settings.

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The weather outside is frightful, and it’s not looking much better in the bumbling stumbling world of Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout. Mediatonic’s wobble royale has entered its chilly third season, Winter Knockout, bringing in a blurry on seasonal new stages, suitably cosy new cosmetics, and – as an extra treat for us PC folks – the arrival of private lobbies that’ll let you tumble through the game’s challenges with 59 of your closest mates.

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A whole new Caribbean island has arrived in GTA Online with the launch of The Cayo Perico Heist today, inviting us to completely rinse the drug lord El Rubio. Yes, sadly, his party island is only for the heist, not a place we can visit any time. It’s an intriguing heist though, and one we can actually complete solo for once. And we get our own submarine. Also, Dr Dre pops up for like 30 seconds.

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I get it. Every article, podcast and video revolves around one topic and you’re almost at breaking point. But… if you’re not there yet, then listen to this episode of The PC Gaming Weekspot! The Big Game is indeed a big game, so there’s a lot to say about Cyberpunk 2077.

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All of EA Play’s games on Xbox Game Pass would’ve made for one hell of a Christmas present, sure. But while today was meant to be the big day, it looks like it’ll be a couple more months before EA’s catalogue is rolled into Microsoft’s already-generous subscription service. Xbox today announced that it’ll be 2021 before The Sims, Battlefield, Dragon Age and friends become part of your Game Pass subscription.

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I’ll let you in on a secret, and that is that I think Cyberpunk 2077 is a decent enough game, but it annoys you by getting in its own way all the time. An example of this is the setting Night City itself. It’s a cracking city to have a wander around. I like how the districts really feel different, I like the strange warrens that are the multi-level covered street markets, I like the huge, hollow-centred blocks of flats that make playing the game like being inside that brilliant Judge Dredd movie (starring Karl Urban’s chin as Dredd). Night City is a marvellous, filthy monstrosity to explore, and this remains true as long as you don’t look at anything at ground level.

This is because when you look at ground level you see all the vans with pop-in textures, duplicate NPCs, NPCs spawning in and then disappearing again when you turn your back, cops that start shooting at you if you bump into them and then forget where you are if you move 30 feet away, palm trees that lean over like they’re screaming, and so on. Mostly, ground level is where the AI happens, and the AI is currently… not great. But if you look up the whole time, you see lovely pillars of concrete and neon, and everything is okay again. Observe some of my favourite views from Night City:

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I don’t particularly like the idea of being purposefully captured by aliens in order to kill them from inside their big scary lairs, but this appears to be exactly what The Coalition will have you doing in the first story expansion for Gears Of War 5. The Hivebusters DLC arrived today, dropping players in with a familiar team ready to get going on their debut mission to bust some hives.

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For being the biggest game of the past decade, Fortnite‘s system requirements aren’t exactly generous. Okay, yes, it’ll run on phones and the Switch, but my ratty old laptop still struggles with it, which is why I’m actually excited by the game’s experimental new “performance” mode, which hopes to improve framerates for folks who are already scraping the lowest graphics sliders.

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Ubisoft’s Viking adventure, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, adds some limited-time winter festivities today. Preparations for the Yule Festival have dropped alongside the game’s 1.1.0 title update, which also lays the groundwork for the upcoming Settlement expansion. It all comes with a bundle of merry bug fixes and game improvements too – addressing the serious stuff like freezes and balancing, and the fun stuff such as floating Eivors and clingy NPCs.

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One of the first choices you’ll make in Cyberpunk 2077 is that of your character’s appearance. There’s a fairly deep suite of customisation options to play with, and given that you’ll see your character every time you open your inventory you’ll want to put some time in. Once you’ve started your story in Night City you’ll probably be wondering whether you can change your appearance after the initial section. Here’s what you need to know.

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