Cyberpunk 2077 HD Reworked Project to Launch on March 12th; Creator Promises No Performance Loss

Renowned modder Halk Hogan revealed today that his highly anticipated Cyberpunk 2077 HD Reworked Project texture mod will be released on March 12th. He also promised that thanks to painstaking optimization, there would be no performance loss as long as the user has unused VRAM.

Those are undoubtedly lofty claims, but Halk Hogan made a name for himself with The Witcher 3 HD Reworked Project, which was so acclaimed that CD Projekt RED decided to add it into the Next-Gen update as one of the integrated mods.

The upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 HD Reworked Project texture mod isn’t the only visual upgrade coming to the open world first-person action RPG. Developer CD Projekt RED is working with NVIDIA to release the so-called Ray Tracing: Overdrive update, which will add advanced ray tracing features, such as:

• NVIDIA RTX Direct Illumination (RTXDI) gives each neon sign, street lamp, car headlight, LED billboard, and TV accurate ray-traced lighting and shadows, bathing objects, walls, passing cars, and pedestrians in accurate colored lighting;
• Ray-traced indirect lighting and reflections now bounce multiple times, compared to the previous solution’s single bounce. The result is even more accurate, realistic, and immersive global illumination, reflections, and self-reflections;
• Ray-traced reflections are now rendered at full resolution, further improving their quality;
• Improved, more physically-based lighting removes the need for any other occlusion techniques.

Thankfully, Cyberpunk 2077 was recently updated with NVIDIA DLSS 3 support, giving GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs performance headroom to spare. Whether that will be enough for the demanding Overdrive update remains to be seen; admittedly, the fate of The Witcher 3 Next-Gen, which currently runs badly even on the most high-end PCs, isn’t reassuring.

There’s no release date yet for the Overdrive update, but come back on March 12th and we’ll certainly have more on Cyberpunk 2077 HD Reworked Project.