Path Tracing in Cyberpunk 2077 on AMD Hardware
Cyberpunk 2077 was one of the first major games to implement full path tracing. The rollout was heavily NVIDIA-centric at launch, and AMD Radeon users faced a rocky experience for years — including a notorious "pink tracing" bug — before AMD's own denoising technology finally arrived in 2026.
Timeline
April 2021 — Patch 1.2: Ray Tracing on AMD (RDNA 2)
The first ray tracing support for AMD's RX 6000 series (RDNA 2) arrived with Patch 1.2. This was traditional (non-path-traced) ray tracing: reflections, shadows, and ambient occlusion. Performance was noticeably worse than on NVIDIA RTX cards, partly because AMD had no equivalent to DLSS at the time.
November 2022 — Patch 1.61: FSR 2.1
Patch 1.61 added AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.1 (FSR 2.1) support. This was a significant quality-of-life improvement for AMD users running ray tracing, providing a meaningful performance uplift via temporal upscaling.
April 11, 2023 — Patch 1.62: Path Tracing / Overdrive Mode
Patch 1.62 introduced Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode — full path tracing — as a technology preview. This replaced traditional ray tracing with a physically-based simulation where every light bounce is traced, dramatically improving realism.
Key caveats at launch:
- Overdrive Mode was co-developed with NVIDIA and primarily recommended for RTX 40 series GPUs (4070 Ti and up).
- AMD RDNA 2 and RDNA 3 cards could enable Overdrive Mode but delivered poor performance without dedicated AMD denoising hardware acceleration.
- A significant technical reason for AMD's difficulty: the game used NVIDIA's Spatially Hashed Radiance Cache (SHARC) — a proprietary NVIDIA technology to accelerate path tracing. AMD hardware has no native support for SHARC, causing both performance issues and visual corruption.
- AMD users could render path-traced Photo Mode screenshots regardless of GPU, even if real-time performance was impractical.
September 21, 2023 — Update 2.0: DLSS Ray Reconstruction (NVIDIA only)
Update 2.0 (released alongside the Phantom Liberty expansion) added NVIDIA DLSS Ray Reconstruction — an AI-powered denoiser that replaced traditional denoisers for path-traced frames. This was exclusive to NVIDIA RTX GPUs. AMD had no equivalent feature at this time.
December 5, 2023 — Update 2.1: ReSTIR GI & Overdrive out of Preview
Update 2.1 graduated Overdrive Mode from a technology preview to a fully released feature, and added ReSTIR GI (Reservoir-Based Spatiotemporal Importance Resampling for Global Illumination) — improving the quality of path-traced lighting in dark areas without a significant performance cost.
The AMD "Pink Tracing" Problem
What It Was
After the launch of Overdrive Mode, AMD users began reporting severe pink/magenta lighting artifacts when path tracing was enabled. Reflections, lights, and entire scene areas would appear washed in fluorescent pink rather than their correct colours.
Root Cause
The cause was incompatibility with NVIDIA SHARC (Spatially Hashed Radiance Cache), which is embedded in Cyberpunk 2077's path tracing implementation. SHARC is an NVIDIA-proprietary technique for caching irradiance samples to speed up path tracing convergence. AMD hardware handles or fails to execute these data structures differently, resulting in garbage data being rendered as bright pink output.
When It Appeared
The pink tracing issue was first widely reported immediately after Patch 1.62 (April 2023) and persisted as a known AMD-specific problem through multiple driver versions. Reports confirmed the bug was still present as late as AMD driver 25.9.1 (late 2025), affecting RX 6000, RX 7000, and even the new RX 9000 series cards.
Workarounds
The most reliable fix was a community mod — particularly:
- Advanced Path Tracing mod — offers a setting to explicitly disable SHARC, which eliminates the pink artifacts. The mod's "Medium" quality preset disables SHARC automatically.
- UltraPlus mod — similarly exposes the option to disable SHARC.
Driver rollbacks to older versions (e.g., 25.3.1) were also reported as a partial workaround by some users.
Driver Fix (Partial — March 2026)
AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 26.3.1 (released March 19–20, 2026) patched an "intermittent application crash or driver timeout while loading a saved game in Cyberpunk 2077 with Path Tracing enabled." This addressed the stability/crash aspect of the AMD path tracing issues but did not explicitly resolve the pink visual artifacts. Users may still need community mods or monitor further driver updates for a complete resolution of the visual corruption.
AMD Ray Regeneration (Ray Reconstruction)
What It Is
AMD Ray Regeneration (also called Ray Regeneration in AMD tooling) is AMD's machine-learning-based denoiser for ray tracing and path tracing workloads — AMD's equivalent to NVIDIA's DLSS Ray Reconstruction. It uses AI to reconstruct high-quality ray-traced frames from fewer samples, improving global illumination, reflections, and light interaction with volumetrics.
When It Arrived
AMD Ray Regeneration 1.1 was included in AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 26.3.1, released March 19, 2026.
Hardware Requirements
Ray Regeneration requires RDNA 4 architecture — i.e., Radeon RX 9000 series GPUs only. It does not work on RDNA 3 (RX 7000) or RDNA 2 (RX 6000) hardware.
Can You Enable It in Cyberpunk 2077?
As of early 2026:
- Official support via game update: Cyberpunk 2077 received FSR 4 support with game update 2.3, requiring at minimum AMD Software 25.8.1. If you have an RX 9000 series GPU, you can enable the FSR 4 option in the in-game Graphics settings by activating the "FSR 4 Upgrade" option within AMD Adrenalin Software first.
- Ray Regeneration specifically: As of driver 26.3.1, Ray Regeneration 1.1 is available and is described by AMD as working best when combined with FSR upscaling. Whether it is accessible as a distinct option within Cyberpunk 2077's own settings menu (vs. driver-layer integration) may depend on further CD Projekt RED game updates.
- Unofficial support (OptiScaler): The OptiScaler mod can be used to inject AMD Ray Regeneration and FSR 4.1 into Cyberpunk 2077 even without official game-side support, by replacing relevant game DLL files. This may come with minor visual artifacts or compatibility caveats.
Summary Table
| Date | Event | AMD Impact |
|---|---|---|
| April 2021 | Patch 1.2 — Ray tracing support for AMD RDNA 2 | Traditional RT on RX 6000 series, poor perf vs NVIDIA |
| November 2022 | Patch 1.61 — FSR 2.1 added | Performance boost for RT on AMD |
| April 11, 2023 | Patch 1.62 — Path Tracing (Overdrive Mode) | AMD functional but slow; SHARC incompatibity causes pink tracing |
| September 2023 | Update 2.0 — DLSS Ray Reconstruction | NVIDIA only; no AMD equivalent |
| December 2023 | Update 2.1 — Overdrive out of preview, ReSTIR GI | Minor quality improvements for AMD too |
| Early 2025–late 2025 | Pink tracing persists | Confirmed through driver 25.9.1 |
| ~2025 (game update 2.3) | FSR 4 support added to Cyberpunk 2077 | Requires RX 9000 + AMD Software ≥25.8.1 |
| March 19, 2026 | Adrenalin 26.3.1 — AMD Ray Regeneration 1.1 | RX 9000 series only; crash fix for PT on AMD |
Sources
- Cyberpunk 2077 Patch 1.62 Notes — Shacknews
- Cyberpunk 2077 Update 2.1 Notes — WCCFTech
- AMD Adrenalin 26.3.1 Release Notes — AMD
- AMD Ray Regeneration Overview — GPUOpen
- AMD Pink Tracing Discussion (SHARC) — Reddit r/Amd
- Cyberpunk 2077 FSR 4 Support — Overclock3D
- AMD Ray Regeneration in Adrenalin 26.3.1 — Tom's Hardware
- Optiscaler Mod for FSR 4 / Ray Regeneration — WCCFTech