A technical analysis compares Red Dead Redemption 2 with Cyberpunk 2077 running full path tracing, arguing that the former achieves a more stable and believable sense of realism during dynamic gameplay by relying on traditional lighting, materials, and level-of-detail trade-offs. However, this is a technical perspective and not an objective verdict on which game has superior graphics.
The analysis suggests that path tracing relies on scene geometry and BVH structures, making it difficult for content not included in these to correctly participate in lighting calculations. As a result, Cyberpunk 2077 requires several trade-offs between performance and visual quality, including the absence of parallax mapping on some ground surfaces, limited LOD distances, BVH consuming VRAM, and volumetric fog not fully participating in reflection occlusion. When the internal rendering resolution is lowered, the image may also exhibit artifacts related to upscaling, denoising, and occlusion changes.
In contrast, Red Dead Redemption 2 uses traditional techniques such as shadow maps, pre-baked ambient occlusion with dynamic SSAO, screen-space reflections, environment cubemaps, light probes, and volumetric systems. While these methods do not fully simulate real light propagation, they save significant performance and VRAM, allowing for more distant geometry and foliage details, higher-resolution textures, and parallax effects.
The analysis also points out that traditional approaches come with clear costs. Baked lighting increases development workload and struggles to adapt to moving light sources like the sun in open worlds. One of the goals of path tracing is precisely to reduce this production burden. Therefore, this comparison emphasizes the difference between "physically accurate" and "visually believable," rather than dismissing path tracing itself.