NVIDIA’s DLSS 3.5 brings upgraded ray-tracing to Cyberpunk 2077 this week

Ahead of dropping the paid Phantom Liberty expansion next week, CD Projekt Red will release a major update for Cyberpunk 2077 on September 21. The patch will overhaul a lot of the game's systems, switch up the skill trees and make other sweeping changes. There should be a significant visual upgrade for many PC players as well. As of Thursday, Cyberpunk 2077 will be the first game to support DLSS 3.5, the latest version of NVIDIA's upscaling tech.

DLSS 3.5 has a feature called Ray Reconstruction, which uses AI to upgrade the ray-traced elements of a game. According to NVIDIA, it "replaces hand-tuned denoisers, which resolve sampled rays in a scene, with an NVIDIA supercomputer-trained AI network that generates higher-quality pixels in between sampled rays."

The company trained DLSS 3.5 on five times the volume of data it fed into DLSS 3. NVIDIA claims the latest version can pinpoint different ray-traced effects to both make more intelligent decisions about factoring in temporal and spatial data, and to "retain high frequency information for superior-quality upscaling."

You don't necessarily need to have a 40-series GeForce RTX GPU to see the benefit. While only those graphics cards support DLSS 3, the latest version of the tech will be available on all RTX GPUs.

In the case of Cyberpunk 2077, Ray Reconstruction will help to deliver "an even better, more immersive, more realistic experience," NVIDIA claims. That's due to upgraded quality and clarity of reflections, more accurate global illumination and more dynamically responsive lighting, the company says.

You'll be able to try out DLSS 3.5 in more games this fall. Along with Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, it will be soon available in the likes of Portal RTX and Alan Wake 2.