UPDATE

It turns out that the image is a fake mockup. That said, raytracing could very well be featured in the final game as hinted by the two Twitter comments made by the development team we've mentioned in the original story below. We'd be more surprised if there was no raytracing, frankly, knowing CD Projekt RED.

DICE: Our Passion for Ray Tracing Burns Hot, Many Optimizations Coming to BFV from NVIDIA and Us

ORIGINAL STORY

Yesterday was an unexpectedly big day for Cyberpunk 2077. CD Projekt RED once again mastered the already enormous hype surrounding the game by enticing dozens of thousands of fans to follow a cryptic livestream until it turned into the full 48-minute long gameplay demo seen by the press.

As great as that was, there's another tidbit of news (albeit unconfirmed as of yet) that came to light just a few hours ago. A leaked image of the Cyberpunk 2077 settings panel appeared on Reddit and by far the most interesting options in there are NVIDIA HairWorks and NVIDIA Ray Tracing (RTX).

Of course, this has to be treated as a rumor for the time being. CD Projekt RED didn't confirm anything yet, though they did suggest via the game's official Twitter account that NVIDIA RTX is 'beautiful' and the developers are 'very excited' about the technology.

NVIDIA Bundles GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 2080 & RTX 2070 With Battlefield V – Free Ray Tracing Game With Ray Tracing Cards

Beautiful! ? — Cyberpunk 2077 (@CyberpunkGame) August 20, 2018

We’re very excited about the announcement from our friends @nvidia but don’t have any details to share at the moment. — Cyberpunk 2077 (@CyberpunkGame) August 22, 2018

It wouldn't be the first time CD Projekt RED partnered with NVIDIA, anyway. NVIDIA HairWorks was also featured in The Witcher III: Wild Hunt, alongside NVIDIA HBAO+ for Ambient Occlusion. Moreover, with the game probably coming out in late 2019 or early 2020, support for raytracing seems like a no-brainer for a company that prides itself to power its games with cutting edge technology.

Should this feature be confirmed, it would be a PC exclusive. Console gamers won't be able to play the game in its full ray traced, but at least they'll still get Cyberpunk 2077 on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One as confirmed by lead cinematic animator Maciej Pietras to CGMagazine.

We knew we are developing the game for PC, PS4, and Xbox One. And we started the process of optimization right at the start. So that’s why what you see running on the demo is a PC, which is like i7 and 1080 Ti. We are from scratch thinking about optimization, about how the streaming works, how to introduce global illumination, for instance, without overwhelming the CPU.

Chris also posted his impressions of the Cyberpunk 2077 Gamescom 2018 demo, by the way, and they're unsurprisingly glowing.