Analyzing SSR versus RT in Cyberpunk reveals distinct approaches to security and risk management.
Analyzing SSR versus RT in Cyberpunk reveals distinct approaches to security and risk management.
It's likely already known that ray tracing impacts GPU performance significantly. Yet I found myself curious about its true value. Screen Space Reflections in Cyberpunk are impressive, and the best part is they use less of your GPU power compared to ray tracing. Here’s a quick test—guess which setting each one represents! All visuals are rendered on an RTX 2060 OC, and I also took out the FPS tracking. Most people said the third image (bottom left) looks superior, likely the ray-traced version. Surprise! This isn’t what they advertise. In this case, I’d choose SSR for Psycho for a better visual experience and better performance. The other image clearly highlights the performance gap between RT and SSR, but also demonstrates the steep drop in frames—around 68% loss. It’s unclear how far this technology will advance.
If I played the game, I wouldn’t care whether RT was on or off. I made many mistakes. The RT setting I thought was low just looked poor. The other two options were nearly the same. Raytracing is an interesting feature, but it shouldn’t be a main selling point. Localized ray tracing for reflections that actually affect gameplay would be better. Otherwise, you’ll only see fake reflections and lights when they look bad. With RT you’ll get some impressive moments, then you’ll forget about them until you have another real one. If you turned it off, you probably wouldn’t notice. I think this generation is the one where PC hardware ray tracing reaches a decent level, with focused RT on consoles—meaning only where it matters. That way, once we get to the next generation we can fully use it after learning what works and what doesn’t, instead of pretending everything is ray-traced when it shouldn’t be.