What happened to Path Tracing in this game?

[Sarafan]

Here's the story. I returned to Cyberpunk 2077 after a few weeks of break. Last time I played the game near the release date of Phantom Liberty. Back then Path Tracing was functioning ok. I had some slight ghosting on moving objects and that's it. Quite standard thing when it comes to Path or Ray Tracing. I launched the game today and to my surprise Path Tracing looks much worse. You can see the distortions in the video. They're especially visible below the moving car. A few weeks ago the car was leaving only a slight trail (ghosting). Now there are massive light distortions there that greatly influence the look of the game. The same effect is visible when you move the gun around, but it's less noticeable because these moves aren't so fast.

I checked two driver versions. Older, dedicated to Phantom Liberty and newest released today. The result is the same. I haven't changed anything in my PC specs, so it's clearly the game fault (update 2.02?). It's like someone reduced the speed in which the game renders some of the ray bounces (to improve performance?). I don't understand why someone messes with things that work very good. The game doesn't need any Path Tracing performance optimizations, because it's a niche thing anyway. Why not give us advanced configuration options for the technology instead? Right now the game looks very bad with Path Tracing in some locations. The light distortions are so annoying that I'm considering to disable Path Tracing at all...

 

[spyke89]

mine is even more fed up. i came back to the game after patch 2.1 and i noticed that some graphical setting were reset to default. I went ahead and enabled dlss frame generation again and patch tracing and it looks very noisy.

 

[spyke89]

i just purged nvidia driver using DDU in safe mode and for me it seemed to fix my issue.