Cyberpunk 2077 has had a roller-coaster of a journey. A buggy, broken game at launch became one of the most optimized ray-traced/path-traced PC games a year later. The Phantom Liberty DLC was incredibly well-received, winning awards, and brought the game back onto the most-played charts. Here’s how Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 performs in 2025, and the best graphics settings for PC.
Cyberpunk 2077 PC Optimization TLDR
Cyberpunk 2077 Official PC Specs
PC System Specs
1080p 30 FPS
1080p 60 FPS
4K 60 FPS
OS
Win 10 (64-bit)
Win 10 (64-bit)
Win 10 (64-bit)
CPU
Intel i7-6700|Ryzen 5 1600
Intel i7-12700|Ryzen 7 7800X3D
Intel i9-12900|Ryzen 9 7900X
GPU
NVIDIA GTX 1060|AMD RX 580|Arc A380
NVIDIA RTX 2060 SUPER| AMD RX 5700 XT| Arc A770
NVIDIA RTX 3080|AMD RX 7900 XTX
RAM
12 GB
16 GB
20 GB
Storage
70 GB SSD
70 GB SSD
70 GB NVME
Cyberpunk 2077 requires a GeForce RTX 2060 Super, an RTX 3060, or a Radeon RX 5700 XT for a consistent 60 FPS at 1080p using the high quality settings.
The CPU specs include the Core i7-12700 or a Ryzen 7 7800X3D, though you can get away with a non-X3D part quite comfortably.
The game requires 16 GB of main memory and 70 GB of SSD storage.
1440p1080p RT
Which CPUs and GPUs perform the best in Cyberpunk 2077?
Cyberpunk 2077 runs better on Radeon RX 7000/9000 GPUs with rasterization, but NVIDIA RTX GPUs are faster with ray-tracing and path-tracing. Benchmarks here.
Intel’s 13th and 14th Gen CPUs perform the best. It’s one of the few games to leverage hybrid core CPUs for smoother frame rates.
AMD’s Ryzen 7000X3D and 9000X3D also perform very well in Cyberpunk 2077.
Cyberpunk 2077: CPU Benchmarks
Is ray-tracing worth the performance hit?
Ray-tracing can dramatically improve the visual fidelity in games with plenty of glossy surfaces and artificial lighting. Cyberpunk 2077 is one of them.
Reflections benefit the most from ray-tracing, followed by lighting (RTGI). Shadows can be disabled without much quality loss.
Upscaling helps attain playable frame rates with ray-tracing.
Cyberpunk 2077 PC Ray Tracing Specs
Ray tracing increases the GPU requirements to an RTX 3080 Ti, RX 7900 XTX, or an RTX 4070. However, you can get away with much slower hardware using upscaling.
The CPU specs increase to the Core i9-12900 or the Ryzen 9 7900X, although the Ryzen 7 parts work fine too.
You’ll need 20 GB of main memory, though 16 GB dual-channel works fine too.
Ray Tracing Specs
1080p RT 30 FPS
1080p RT 60 FPS
4K Overdrive 60 FPS
OS
Win 10 (64-bit)
Win 10 (64-bit)
Win 10 (64-bit)
CPU
Intel i7-9700|Ryzen 5 5600
Intel i9-12900|Ryzen 9 7900X
Intel i9-12900| Ryzen 9 7900X
GPU
NVIDIA RTX 2060|AMD RX 6800 XT|Arc A750
NVIDIA RTX 3080 Ti|AMD RX 7900 XTX
NVIDIA RTX 4080
RAM
16 GB
20 GB
24 GB
Storage
70 GB SSD
70 GB NVME
70 GB NVME
Cyberpunk 2077 Ray Tracing & Path Tracing Specs
What is Overdrive Mode in Cyberpunk?
Path-tracing or overdrive mode expands the ray-tracing algorithm by accounting for thousands of light sources, including multi-bounce lighting, using a unified pipeline that accurately mimics the nature of light. More details here.
What GPU do you need for path tracing in Cyberpunk?
You’ll need a high-end NVIDIA RTX 30-series or an AMD RX 9000 or higher GPU for path-tracing.
Examples include the RTX 3080 Ti and the Radeon RX 9070 XT.
Upscaling and frame generation are essential for playable frame rates.
Install the path-tracing mod to improve both quality and performance.
What are the best settings for Cyberpunk 2077 on PC?
Cyerpunk performs well over 60 FPS on most PCs using a mix of high and medium quality settings, including ray-tracing when paired with upscaling and frame generation.
FPS Gains on disabling/lowering each graphics setting
Screen Space Reflections is the most taxing graphics setting in Cyberpunk 2077. Disable it or reduce it to low or medium.
Volumetric Fog drastically lowers the frame rates, minimally impacting quality. Go with low.
Volumetric Clouds are a luxury and should be set to the lowest.
Ambient Occlusion performs the best at low.
Local Shadow Quality can be reduced to low if facing indoor or nighttime FPS drops.
Color Precision doesn’t impact quality and should be reduced to medium.
Ray-traced Lighting can be reduced to ultra or medium with minor quality degradation.
Ray-traced Shadows are less apparent and can be disabled entirely.
Upscaling should be used regardless of your configuration.
Frame Generation is highly recommended for ray tracing and path tracing.
Windows/System Settings to Optimize
Enable Resizable BAR.
Turn on Game Mode.
Enable Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling (HAGS) and Windowed Optimizations.
Use the Windows “High Performance” power profile and set your GPU power management mode to the same.
Overclock your GPU if you’re narrowly missing the 60 FPS mark.
Ensure you use the proper XMP/EXPO memory profile (if available).
Cyberpunk 2077 averages 70 FPS at 4K, 146 FPS at 1440p, and 160 FPS at 1080p using the Ultra quality settings on the GeForce RTX 4090. The limited 1440p-1080p scaling indicates a CPU bottleneck at 1080p.
Test Setup
CPU: Intel Core i9-12900K @ 5.3 GHz.
Cooler: Arctic Liquid Freezer III 420.
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 FE.
Motherboard: MSI PRO Z790-P WIFI.
Memory: 16 GB x2 @ 6000 MT/s CL30.
Ray-tracing increases the GPU load, thereby alleviating the CPU bottleneck. The RTX 4090 averages 40 FPS at 4K, 81 FPS at 1440p, and 111 FPS at 1080p using the RT Ultra quality preset in Cyberpunk 2077.
Cyberpunk 2077 shows a remarkable ~300% frame rate scaling across its seven graphics quality presets. The GeForce RTX 4090 averages the following at 4K:
RT Ultra: 40 FPS (0%)
RT Medium: 41 FPS (+2.5%)
RT Low: 62.5 FPS (+55%).
Ultra: 70 FPS (+75%).
High: 89 FPS (+122%).
Medium: 111 FPS (+177%).
Low: 150 FPS (+275%).
Crowd Density & FOV
Crowd Density adjusts the number of NPCs in the surrounding areas. Most PCs shouldn’t have any issues running this at the high-quality option.
If you have an older or particularly low-end CPU, you’ll want to lower it.
The Field of View (FOV) slider sets the first-person viewing angle. It doesn’t usually impact the game’s performance.
These are late-stage post-processing effects that don’t impact performance and are left to personal preference. I disable all of them except Lens Flare for maximum sharpness.
Film Grain adds a grainy filter similar to certain films and photos.
Chromatic Aberration adds color distortion along the edges of high contrast surfaces.
Motion Blur, Depth of Field, and Lens Flare fall in the same category as the above.
Improved Facial Lighting & Anisotropy
Improved Facing Lighting enables finer shadows, color tones, and lighting gradients across facial geometry: No performance impact.
Anisotropy enables texture filtering that sharpens textures perpendicular to the screen. The lowest option is 2-3% faster than the rest. Leave it at 8x or 16x unless you don’t mind blurry textures.
1x8x16xAnisotropy
Contact Shadows improve shadow detail along surface edges, crevices, and corners. The performance and visual impact aren’t noticeable.
Contact Shadows
Local, Cascaded & Distant Shadow Quality
Local Shadows adjust the quality of shadows cast by artificial light (when ray-tracing is off). They’re mostly relevant for Cyberpunk’s Neon streets at night and indoors. Disabling them improves performance by 5% (vs. High):
Cascaded Shadows Range sets the draw distance of sun shadows. Lowering it can improve performance by 2-3%. Medium is the sweet spot if you’re looking for a quick FPS gain.
Cascaded Shadows Range
Cascaded Shadows Resolution adjusts the detail of sun shadows. Lower quality options produce noisier and less defined silhouettes. The high-quality option is 3% slower than the rest. Again, medium is the sweet spot.
Cascaded Shadows Resolution
Distant Shadows Resolution sets the quality of distant and intermediate shadows. Lowering it disables the latter, making the latter softer and blurrier. Negligible performance impact.
Distant Shadows Resolution
Local Shadow Mesh Quality sets the detail of shadow-casting objects. Lowering it removes the finer geometric shadows, particularly edges, ledges, and ridges. Minimal FPS hit.
Local Shadow Mesh Quality
Volumetric Fog and Cloud Quality
Volumetric Fog is among the most taxing settings in Cyberpunk 2077. It sets the density and resolution of fog. It only impacts the performance in areas with plenty of fog.
Low and medium quality options perform the same.
High is 8% slower than the above.
Ultra is 12% slower than the lowest.
It can be safely reduced without impacting visuals much.
Volumetric Fog
Volumetric Clouds enable 3D cloud silhouettes. Disabling this option renders planar 2D clouds, granting a 4% performance boost. Each quality level is ~1% slower than the preceding option, but looks very similar.
Volumetric Clouds
Max Dynamic Decals
Maximum Dynamic Decals adjust the number of surfaces illuminated by the sun and artificial lights of Night City. It makes the scene brighter and marginally impacts the game’s performance.
Max Dynamic Decals
Subsurface Scattering emulates the traversal of light through human skin, but its performance and visual impact are hardly noticeable.
Screen Space Reflections
Screen Space Reflections is the most taxing non-RT graphics setting in Cyberpunk 2077. These are low-resolution reflections of onscreen objects on nearby glossy surfaces, including water, glass, and metal.
Ultra quality reduces performance by nearly 40%.
High imposes a 22% FPS decline.
Medium makes the game 15% slower.
Low dampens frame rates by 8-9%.
Psycho cuts frame rates by a third.
If you’re struggling to hit 60 FPS and still want reflections, opt for the medium quality option.
Psycho is barely better than Ultra.
Screen Space Reflections
Ambient Occlusion: SSAO
Ambient Occlusion dramatically affects in-game realism by rendering ambient shadows along surface edges, crevices, corners, and object intersections. It’s highly recommended to leave it enabled:
Low quality is 2-3% slower than Off.
Medium is ~5% slower than Off.
High is 8% slower than Off.
Ray-tracing disables Screen Space Ambient Occlusion in favor of ray-traced ambient occlusion.
Without ray-tracing, high is the sweet spot for midrange PCs.
Ambient Occlusion vs RT AO vs PT AO
Color Precision, Mirrors & LOD
Color Precision sets the color range used by Cyberpunk 2077. Reducing it to medium slightly reduces the color accuracy by stripping similar adjacent shades. It grants a 5-6% performance gain with a minimal quality drop. Highly recommended for low-gamut displays.
Color Precision
Mirror Quality sets the ray-marching quality for your character’s reflection when looking in a mirror. This setting only applies when using a bathroom mirror. Lowering it makes the reflection blurrier and noisier.
Mirror Quality
Level of Detail (LOD) sets the geometric detail of objects as per their distance from the camera. Lowering it leads to increased pop-ins. Since the performance impact is minimal (3%), opt for high.
Level of Detail
Cyberpunk 2077: Ray Tracing
Ray Traced Reflections: Cyberpunk 2077 features innumerable reflective surfaces, ranging from water bodies, polished pavements, grass buildings, and other metal structures across Night City.
Ray-traced reflections add reflections to all the above and any other surface capable of reflecting light.
RT reflections reduce performance by roughly ~10% while significantly improving the visuals.
RT Local Shadows
Ray Traced Shadows: Cyberpunk 2077 leverages ray-tracing to implement “Local Shadows” and “Sun Shadows.”
Local Shadows are less taxing, reducing performance by up to 10%. They are calculated for nearby objects using diffuse lighting.
Sun Shadows can tank the game’s framerates by 15% or higher. Combined with rasterization to improve detail and add contact-hardening softness to sun shadows.
RT Sun Shadows
Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion: Cyberpunk 2077 automatically enables ray-traced ambient occlusion with RT Shadows, adding detailed soft shadows along object boundaries, edges, crevices, and crannies.
Ray-Traced Lighting: Cyberpunk 2077 uses ray-tracing to implement diffuse or indirect lighting. Itconsiders natural light from the sun/moon and the numerous artificial light sources throughout Night City. They all contribute to the scene lighting with single-bounce rays.
“Psycho” quality enables the color properties of the reflecting surfaces. For example, a light ray hitting a shiny red car will cast a reddish tint on whatever it hits next.
RT Lighting is incredibly taxing, reducing framerates by 35-40% at the “Medium” quality, and 50-55% at the “Psycho” quality.
Diffuse Lighting: Lighting from luminous sources scattered (spread about) by non-luminant objects. It is also known as indirect lighting. Think of it as stray light that has been reflected and bounced around by various surfaces in the scene.
Direct Lighting: It refers to light rays coming directly from light sources. After being scattered by non-luminous surfaces, it becomes diffuse light.
Temporal: Pixel data from the same or closeby locations of the screen, but from previous frames. Often used in upscalers and resampling techniques.
Spatial: Pixel data from the same frame, usually from neighboring pixels. Used by upscalers, denoisers, and resmpling filters.
Cyberpunk 2077: Overdrive Mode
Cyberpunk’s path tracing mode unifies the lighting pipeline, adding single-bounce direct and multi-bounce diffuse illumination for the hundreds or thousands of light sources in Night City. Consequently, every glossy surface behaves like a light source, drastically enhancing the lighting quality with colored light bounces.
Path Tracing or overdrive mode enables colored multi-bounce reflections, diffuse, and specular GI (and more)
Path tracing (or overdrive mode) requires frame generation and ray reconstruction. At 4K “Overdrive” mode, the RTX 4090 averages less than 20 FPS. Frame generation “DLSS Quality” pushes the frame rates up an average of 75 FPS, with the balanced and performance presets posting 88.6 FPS and 107 FPS, respectively.
Path tracing calculates diffuse lighting (GI) using multiple bounces. After a bounce, light rays hit additional surfaces, improving light propagation and far-off object coverage.
Glossy or reflective surfaces act as secondary light sources, improving light distribution in low-light areas.
Light rays absorb material color properties upon intersection, spreading it to other surfaces during subsequent bounces.
Reflections are much more detailed as multi-bounce rays gather increased detail before returning to the light source.
RTXDI handles shadows, near and far. Unlike shadow maps and ray tracing with limited instances, it can cast unlimited, highly detailed soft shadows.
RT Reflections vs Path Tracing
Cyberpunk 2077: Path Tracing Mod
I recently came across the “Ultra Plus Best Performance and Visuals” mod on Nexus, which improves Cyberpunk 2077’s path-tracing performance and quality, both at once. It features the following path-tracing implementations:
Ray Tracing + Path Tracing (RT+PT): This combines standard single-bounce ray-tracing for direct lighting with multi-bounce path-tracing for indirect lighting and shadows. It’s highly performant, and only 6% slower than base ray-tracing. However, it is less accurate.
Recommended for budget GPUs like the RTX 3060, RTX 4060, and RTX 3060 Ti.
Path Tracing 20 (PT20): Path Tracing 20 combines RTXDI or direct lighting with multi-bounce diffuse lighting or GI. It uses importance sampling to target the most likely contributing light sources. Lighting data from previous frames and neighboring pixels is reused to improve quality.
PT20 looks nearly as good as PT21 and is 40% faster than vanilla PT.
Recommended for most mid and high-end PCs.
Path Tracing 21 (PT21): Path Tracing 21 combines ReSTIR GI and RTXDI. It builds a reservoir of light samples (per pixel). A light is traced each frame, and combined with similar temporal and spatial samples
The temporal accumulation of samples produces high-quality GI comparable to infinite bounce PT.
However, ReSTIR GI works in screen space, meaning it only tracks onscreen lights, often missing out on distant or obscure lighting.
Path Tracing Next: Path Tracing Next leverages ReGIR (Grid-based Reservoirs), an evolution of ReSTIR. ReGIR constructs a 3D grid of cells, containing multiple reservoirs. Pixels are shaded using the stored light samples of nearby cells using IS, and combined temporally across frames.
Because ReGIR adopts a 3D grid instead of screen space, it is more accurate than ReSTIR GI, especially for off-screen lighting.
Users with flagship GPUs, like the RTX 4080 and the RTX 4090, are encouraged to use it.
Upscaling and Frame Generation
Upscaling and frame generation are quite useful in Cyberpunk 2077, especially if you plan to use ray tracing or path tracing. DLSS is ~90% faster than 4K native in quality mode, with balanced producing 125% higher frame rates. The performance preset is 164% faster, averaging 95.4 FPS.
FSR 3 is slightly slower than DLSS due to ray reconstruction, which improves performance (and quality) on the RTX GPUs.
Frame generation and upscaling make Cyberpunk 2077 175% faster than native at 4K, with balanced mode extending the lead to 230%, and performance to 280%.
DLSS vs FSR 2.1 vs FSR 3 vs XeSS 1.3 (Performance)
All modern upscalers are based on temporal anti-aliasing which leverages image data from previous frames instead of generating it at full resolution. Objects are tracked across frames using motion vectors, accumulating samples and increasing detail using previously rendered frame data.
A Survey of Temporal Antialiasing Techniques (Lei Yang, Shiqiu Liu, Marco Salvi)
Reprojecting and accumulating frames tends to be an approximation and invalid pixel data from previous frames is often carried over. This leads to loss of complex geometry (grass, twigs, hair, etc), often causing ghosting (translucent edges).
DLSS and XeSS use a neural network trained to reject invalid interframe samples. DLSS has shown remarkable improvements over time, producing native-quality output in half the frametime.
FSR 3 uses an algorithmic approach that can be fine-tuned and adjusted for different scenarios. However, it’s a one-fits-all approach, and often struggles with complex geometry.
What is DLSS Ray Reconstruction? Should You Enable It?
Ray tracing uses a similar technique to make up for the relatively low ray budget. The raw output from is noisey, lacking inter-pixel detail.
Denoisers employ temporal accumulation and spatial interpolating blending to smoothen out the result.
Ray Reconstruction gives DLSS an edge in ray tracing, producing higher-quality reflections at the same performance. It employs a neurally trained denoiser that filters temporal and spatial frame data, accumulating high-quality pixels and discarding the rest. This improves lighting detail and reduces ghosting in fast-paced sequences.
Cyberpunk 2077: VRAM Usage
Cyberpunk 2077 uses up to 8 GB of graphics memory at 1080p, 8.7 GB at 1440p, while 4K peaks at 9.64 GB.
Ray-tracing significantly increases the VRAM usage: 10 GB at 1080p, 10.6 GB at 1440p, and 15 GB at 4K.
At 4K, the graphics memory consumption varies from 7.4 GB at “Low” to 9.64 GB at “Ultra” and ~15 GB at “Ray tracing Ultra.”
Cyberpunk 2077: CPU Bottlenecks
Cyberpunk 2077 is GPU-bottlenecked at 1440p and 4K, with a slight CPU bottleneck at 1080p (non-RT). We observed a 30% GPU-busy deviation (frame time/GPU-busy time) at 1080p.
1080p Ultra1080p RT Ultra
Ray-tracing makes the game more GPU-limited, with a GPU-busy deviation of 10%.
1440p Ultra
Cyberpunk 2077: GPU Benchmark
1080p Ultra Quality (Native/No Upscaling)
Cyberpunk 2077 runs better on AMD GPUs without ray tracing:
The Radeon RX 7800 XT is well ahead of the RTX 4070 Ti Super.
The RX 7700 XT is almost as fast as the RTX 4070.
Likewise, the RX 7600 handily beats the RTX 4060.
1080p
1440p Ultra Quality (Native/No Upscaling)
1440p and 4K don’t affect the performance charts much:
The GeForce RTX 4090 is the fastest, followed by the Radeon RX 7900 XTX.
The RTX 4080 Super comes in third.
The RTX 4070 Ti Super edges past the RX 7800 XT at 1440p, beating the 7900 GRE at 4K.
1440p
4K Ultra Quality (Native/No Upscaling)
4K
Cyberpunk 2077: Ray Tracing Performance
Ray tracing flips the tables on the Radeons. The RX 7900 XTX is only as fast as the RTX 4070 at 1080p (RT Ultra), while the 4060 Ti tackles the 7800 XT.
1080p
Increasing the resolution to 1440p improves the Radeons’ placement, but it’s far from ideal. The RX 7900 XTX manages to beat the RTX 4070 but is considerably slower than the 4080 Super.
1440p
Cyberpunk 2077 PC: Optimized Settings 2025
Optimized Settings
High-end PC
Mid-Range PC
Low-end PC
Resolution
4K (3840 × 2160)
1440p (2560 x 1440)
1080p (1920 x 1080)
Target FPS
60 FPS+
60 FPS+
60 FPS+
Field of View
100
100
90
Motion Blur
Up to you
Up to you
On
Depth of Field
Up to you
Up to you
On
Texture Quality
High
High
6 GB GPUs: Medium 8 GB GPUs: High
Texture Filtering
AF 16x
AF 16x
AF 8x
LOD
High
High
High
Contact Shadows
On
On
On
Improved Facial Lighting
On
On
On
Local Shadow Mesh Quality
High
High
High
Local Shadow Quality
High
High
High
Cascaded Shadows Range
High
High
High
Cascaded Shadows Resolution
High
High
High
Distant Shadow Resolution
High
High
High
Volumetric Cloud Quality
Ultra
Ultra
Off
Volumetric Fog Resolution
Ultra
Ultra
Medium
Maximum Dynamic Decals
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Screen Space Reflections Quality
Ultra
Ultra
Medium
Subsurface Scattering Quality
High
High
High
Ambient Occlusion
Ultra
Ultra
High
Color Precision
High
High
Medium
Mirror Quality
High
High
High
Upscaling
DLSS/FSR Quality
DLSS/FSR Balanced
DLSS/FSR Balanced
FPS Gains on disabling/lowering each graphics setting, versus 4K Ultra: Settings not included didn’t impact framerates
Best Ray Tracing Settings + Overdrive Mode
Ray Tracing Settings
High-end PC
Mid-Range PC
Low-end PC
Ray-traced Reflections
On
On
On
Ray-traced Local Shadows
On
On
On
Ray-traced Sun Shadows
On
On
On
Ray-traced Lighting
Psycho
Ultra (Medium for Radeon)
Ultra (Medium/Low for Radeon GPUs)
Path Tracing
Only with FG (Off for Radeon)
Only with FG (Off for Radeon)
Only with FG (Off for Radeon)
Frame Generation (for Overdrive Mode)
DLSS FG “Quality”
DLSS FG “Balanced”
DLSS FG “Balanced”
FPS Gains on enabling only one ray tracing setting at a time, versus 4K RT Max “Psycho”
Radeon users are advised to disable ray-traced lighting and path tracing.
NVIDIA RTX 40 series players can max out the ray-tracing settings as frame generation provides an ample performance boost.
Processors, PC gaming, and the past. I have been writing about computer hardware for over seven years with more than 5000 published articles. Started off during engineering college and haven't stopped since. Find me at HardwareTimes and PC Opset.
