I do not have the means to buy a recent graphics card.

What's so essentially different in DX12 that makes it a have-to-have?

I don't think the big attraction to new graphics cards is DX12... I think it's more for the ray tracing. But honestly, there aren't that many examples where ray tracing makes that big a difference yet. In almost every game I play... I don't even notice the difference.

(I'm playing on an RTX 3070 myself).

Cyberpunk 2077 is an exception... because the devs found all kinds of places in the game like pools of water on the ground, city lights, reflections in glass, etc to show off ray tracing. That's probably why it's an NVIDIA sponsored game. They want to show off their ray tracing technology.

Proof the average person can't see the difference with ray tracing on/off in most cases:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VGwHoSrIEU

And it's a TERRIBLE time to buy a graphics card right now. Graphics cards are selling for multiple times their MSRP right now because there isn't enough supply, because of booming cryptocurrency markets, and heavy scalping.

So I would suggest holding off on buying a new GPU for now unless you really want to for some reason (like if you have a large number of modern games you want to play that require a new GPU, or you have a lot of time to spend playing games for some reason).

Not only that... but I've neard the next-generation GPUs likely to come out next fall will be quite revolutionary... so there's even more reason not to buy a GPU right now.

If you really feel like you have to buy something now, I'll just point out that Intel is claiming they have a lot of supply of cheap new Intel brand GPUs they will be selling starting early in 2022, so hopefully that will bring GPU prices down and alleviate the supply shortages we've been seeing...

Thanks for the reply.
For sure I will not buy a VGA now. However, thanks for telling me/us why buying wouldn't be so clever!

Now specifically to Cyberpunk 2077 - I assume that you play(ed) it. Do you know if raytracing can be disabled?
IOW, the game won't run on my NV GK110 (2x6GB) or will there be just no raytracing/reflection, Water surfaces not reflective but blind or so?

I think I read somewhere that DX12 can/is emulated well by DX11-wired video graphics adapters? May not be the problem here but interesting anyways...

Thanks for the information!
You don't happen to have a box with an only-DX11-capable card where you could try if the game runs with (emulated) DX12?

Or maybe somebody else?

I have a Zotac GeForce GTX 1060 6GB, which is DX12. I'm afraid I don't know how to emulate other DirectX versions.

I did just see that there is https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/360015701497?product=gog which shows the minimal system reqirements.

Among these are:
DirectX 12 and 64-bit Windows 7 (SEVEN). Strange, I thought Microsoft has abandoned Windows 7.
The minimal system requirements also show "Please note that Cyberpunk 2077 is not compatible with Windows 8 and 8.1 as the game requires DirectX 12, which is not supported on the mentioned OS"

The minimal VGA is the GTX 780 - it does have the same GPU that my VGA has.
It is the GK110B named graphics processor (which has the Kepler microarchitecture). But it "fully" supports DirectX 11 (only)!

However: "Nvidia supports the DX12 API on all the DX11-class GPUs it has shipped; these belong to the Fermi, Kepler and Maxwell architectural families." [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_700_series#Microsoft_DirectX_support ]
And @Nvidia: "DirectX 12 is supported by all Ampere, Turing, Pascal, Maxwell, Kepler and *Fermi GPUs."

So it would run on my PC then?!

Speaking on new GPUs:
I have played most of the current RT titles, and find most of them to be "meh." The main issue for me is that even though a person sits in front of a screen playing a game, and they know it is a video game (they can suspend reality while playing), graphical choices included with raytracing sometimes "go against" what feels correct/natural.

For example, if I am walking around in real life and I look down into a puddle of water, the reflection of whatever is in the background (like buildings) will be somewhat blurry/distorted and have a ripple/skew to them. If you look online at photography in the rain you will see what I mean. And for a long time developers have been faking these with screen space reflections that match what it would look like in real life, fairly well. Raytracing adds real reflections which looks beautiful with windows and mirrors in Cyberpunk2077, but when you look at the water puddles everywhere it stops looking natural/real. I think they screwed up every use of raytracing in this game, except for RT reflections with glass (like mirrors and windows on buildings).

With my 7700k and 3080ti I get around 70-75 FPS at 4k, almost everything maxed, and only RT reflections set to simple on. Turning off the RT reflections gave me about 10 more FPS back. I eventually just played with it off, because the water reflections look terrible. Like a perfect mirror of the surroundings. But muddy, dirty, dirt-filled water (with anything like cars, people, the wind causing vibrations) usually looks fuzzy in real life. To me the screen space reflections on the water looks far superior and of course we don't need to suffer losing FPS for it. I do wish it could be turned on just for glass surfaces though, because seeing the reflections of NPCs walking by is nice. :)

Anyways, I know you asked about DX12, but thought if you we looking at new GPUs this might help. Everyone has their own opinions, and I would say it's agood idea to include comparing youtube videos and screenshots from people playing at maxed settings with monster GPUs. Even though you may not be buying one of those you can see the currently what it might look like for you.

You also might end up preferring like me, to play with RT off. So far only Control is the only game that has "correct" raytracing. Even though I did not like that game too much (the repeating corridors and combat), RT was done well in that game! Not just to make things shiny and cool, but in a way that makse sense when you are inside the game-space. Reflections are used where it makes sense that it would, and it feels sorta "hyper realistic." I think out of that naturally comes the "oooh and aaah" we all want to whatever extent.

GK110 is Kepler so D12 should be supported if this information is correct.

You have 2x6GB? So it's dual GK110? Like GTX Titan Z or something?

That should be about the same as GTX 970: https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-GTX-Titan-Z-SLI-Disabled-vs-Nvidia-GTX-970/m17751vs2577

Here's a comparison between Ray Tracing On and Off so you can see. It looks pretty good without RTX as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iz2chGzBM5A

And of course you can just buy the game, try if it runs and if not, you can refund the game:
https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/360011314978-How-do-I-refund-a-game-?product=gog

Right. I got it from a family member years ago. When VR became (and was) the big thing the Titan wasn't good enough anymore. :-) I've checked the values on userbenchmark.com (comparing the GTX 870 and my VGA). However, why "SLI disabled"? Does it make a difference when there is no other Graphics Card plugged in? Or does it just mean that only one GPU is active? AFAIK SLI does not play any role when the GPUs are on one board... it's for connecting two graphics cards. I agree, quite impressive! I'll have to see how it works on 21:9 (3440x1440) then - I might have to lower the resolution.
Is there a benefit in having a CPU with eight cores or so? Hm... I think I'll go for it then.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeFzKTCe7Qc

Quite possibly either resolution or quality. Although your GPU doesn't seem to be that bad, I don't think you can play this game on 3440x1440 with Ultra settings. My 2080 Ti is screaming when I try 4k Ultra settings RT=On.

FYI

*sigh*
I've decided to wait for a heavy bugfix. If I understood right that won't be the nextGen(?) update because that concentrates on fixing problems in the console versions.

From what I read here and in the forums on CDPR I definitively would not enjoy the game in its current state.
I hope that CDPR will go on bugfixing this - the game seems to have so much potential...


Thanks to everybody helping me with my question(s)!

There should be the patch 1.5 coming during the Q1, probably coinciding with the next gen console update. I am guessing a soft relaunch of the game. It will probably going to be advertised as "our biggest update yet" or something like that.

It runs pretty well on high end PCs, but I cannot say how your GPU will handle it. It's still pretty good, but it is getting a bit old. If unsure, yeah, wait for the patch 1.5. Should come before April.