Will Cyberpunk 2077 support ray tracing on the Nintendo Switch 2? Possibilities explored

Nintendo announced that Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition will come to Switch 2 on the launch day at the Nintendo Direct event on April 2, 2025. A short footage of the game was revealed by CDProjecktRed's game director, Adam Badowski, at the event. It revealed some interesting details about the nature of the game and how it is running.

One of the most noticeable elements was ray-traced reflections, which were quite visually appealing. Does that mean Cyberpunk 2077 will have ray tracing on the Nintendo Switch 2? It's possible, but other ray-traced techniques, such as RT Shadows, GI, or AO, seemed missing. Besides, Adam Badowski didn't explicitly say the game will have ray tracing, so anything is possible.

This article will analyze the footage shared at the event and explain if Cyberpunk 2077 will support ray tracing on the Nintendo Switch 2.

Note: Some aspects of this article are subjective and reflect the writer's opinions.

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Does the Nintendo Switch 2 have ray tracing support?

Nintendo Switch 2 (Image via Nintendo)

The Nintendo Switch 2 is powered by an Nvidia chip, which supports ray tracing and Nvidia's DLSS. The latter is a critical component that ensures games using ray tracing get decent frame rates. Nvidia also confirmed the existence of tracing and DLSS inside the Switch 2 chipset in their blog post. Team Green discussed how they help in powering next-gen visuals in modern games.

Since the chipset supports ray tracing, there is no reason why a game couldn't utilize it. However, Nintendo has left it to game developers to decide if they plan to use it since there's a significant performance cost associated with ray tracing.

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Will Cyberpunk 2077 have any ray tracing techniques on the Nintendo Switch 2?

Ray-traced reflections in Cyberpunk 2077 (Image via CDProjektRed)

According to Cyberpunk 2077 footage revealed at the Nintendo Direct event, there must be some form of RT reflections with the way the light reflects off the hand in the picture above. However, the footage lacked RT Shadows, RT GI, or AO in that scene.

However, it is also possible that the RT Reflections we see in the picture above are generic footage or one from the PC release. Since the Nintendo Switch 2 is a low-power device, the actual die size of the chip will be smaller, with possibly 10 to 12 Stream Processors (SMs) for the GPU.

Since each SM has one ray tracing core, the Nvidia chip inside the Switch 2 shouldn't have more than 10 - 12 ray tracing cores, which is not enough to run multiple RT effects. At best, the game could run with ray tracing reflections, but that would be it. However, these are all just speculations on my part, and the actual specs can be different. We should learn more as we get close to June 5, 2025, which is the launch date of the Nintendo Switch 2.

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