Cyberpunk 2077 has had a roller-coaster of a journey. An unoptimized, broken game at launch to becoming one of the best-performing ray-traced titles, followed by an overhaul of the gameplay mechanics 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 2024, and the best graphics settings for your PC.
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 runs better on AMD Radeon GPUs, at least when ray-tracing is disabled. The RX 7900 XTX soundly beats the RTX 4080 Super while the RX 7800 XT remains well ahead of the RTX 4070 Ti Super at 1080p. The RX 7700 XT is almost as fast as the RTX 4070 and the RX 7600 handily beats the RTX 4060.
1080p
1440p and 4K aren’t any different. The GeForce RTX 4090 remains the fastest GPU, followed by the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and the RTX 4080 Super at #2 and #3, respectively. The RTX 4070 Ti Super edges past the RX 7800 XT at 1440p, beating the 7900 GRE at 4K.
1440p4K
Cyberpunk 2077: Ray Tracing Benchmarks
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 performs as well as the 7800 XT.
1080p
Increasing the resolution to 1440p slightly improves the placement of the AMD cards, but it’s still far from presentable. The RX 7900 XTX, the fastest Radeon, manages to beat the RTX 4070 but is considerably slower than the 4080 Super.
Cyberpunk 2077 runs well on Intel and AMD Ryzen CPUs. However, it performs slightly better on the 13th Gen Raptor Lake processors, versus the Ryzen 7000/7000X3D parts. The discrepancy is mostly observed in rasterization and disappears (or minimalizes) when ray tracing is enabled. Quite ironic.
Cyberpunk 2077 scales from 159.5 FPS at 1080p “Ultra” to 69.9 FPS at 4K “Ultra” and 40.2 FPS at 4K “Ray tracing Ultra.” QHD or 1440p averages 80.8 FPS and 145.8 FPS with and without ray tracing, respectively.
Test Bench
CPU: Intel Core i9-12900K.
Motherboard: ASUS ROG Maximus Z790 Hero.
Cooler: Lian Li Galahad 360.
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090.
Memory: 16GB x2 DDR5-6000 CL30.
Power Supply: Corsair RM1000e.
The game averaged 150.4 FPS at 4K “Low,” 110.7 FPS at “Medium,” 89.4 FPS at “High,” and 69.9 FPS at “Ultra.” The lowest ray-tracing preset reduces the FPS to 62.5 FPS, while medium and ultra barely manage an average of 40 FPS.
Shadow Quality and Performance
Cyberpunk 2077 offers six shadow settings to tweak the shadow-casting meshes, resolution, distance, and cascading quality. These are “Local Shadow Mesh Quality,” “Local Shadow Quality,” “Cascaded Shadow Resolution,” “Cascaded Shadows Range,” and “Distant Shadow Resolution.”
Contact Shadow Quality controls the quality of the shadows’ edges.
Local Shadow Mesh Quality controls the detail of the shadow-casting meshes. Higher settings produce more detailed object meshes, enhancing the shadow complexity.
Cascaded Shadows reduce shadow aliasing by rendering higher resolution depth textures near the viewer and lower far away. They are usually used for shadows cast by the sun over a large terrain.
Fortunately, all these shadow techniques have a negligible impact on performance, reducing frame rates by less than 1 FPS, even with all set to the lowest quality setting.
Volumetric Fog and Cloud Quality
Volumetric Fog is among the more taxing graphics technologies used in Cyberpunk 2077. Going from “Ultra/High” to Medium/Low” boosts framerates by approximately 10-12%.
Volumetric Fog
Volumetric Clouds don’t affect in-game performance, though that might change depending on your location and ambient weather.
Texture Filtering, Decals, Crowds, and Screen Space Reflections
Anisotropy (texture filtering) notably impacts texture quality, especially in the wilderness, but didn’t tank frame rates on our system. The same can be said for “Dynamic Decal Quality,” “Improved Facial Lighting Geometry” and “Crowd Density.”
Screen Space Reflections is the most taxing non-RT graphics setting in Cyberpunk 2077. Going from “Off” to “Psycho” reduces framerates by nearly 3x, from 112 FPS to 42.8 FPS. “Ultra” is 60% slower, averaging 69.9 FPS, while “High” and “Medium” are 29% and 15% slower, respectively.
Screen Space Reflections
Mirror Quality, Color Precision, and Subsurface Scattering
Level of Detail (LOD), subsurface scattering, and mirror quality don’t affect the performance, although LOD may behave differently in the outskirts of Night City and the wilderness.
Color precision quality improves performance by 5% at the “low” setting. The visual impact is negligible.
Ambient Occlusion Performance
Ambient Occlusion dramatically affects in-game realism by rendering ambient shadows while moderately impacting the performance. Cyberpunk 2077 is up to ~10% faster with ambient occlusion switched off (versus “Ultra”).
Ambient Occlusion vs RT AO vs PT AO
Ray Tracing Performance
Before we look at ray-tracing, here are a few terms you should familiarize yourself with:
Diffuse Lighting: Lighting scattered in a scene by different (mostly rough) non-luminant objects. It is also known as indirect lighting, and makes interiors brighter. Think of it as stray light that has been reflected or scattered by various surfaces in the scene.
Direct Lighting: It refers to light rays coming directly from light sources. After being scattered by objects, 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.
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. Fortunately, RT reflections only 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.” The former are calculated for nearby objects using diffuse lighting, while the latter are combined with rasterization to improve detail and add contact hardening softness to shadows cast by sun/moon light.
Local Shadows are less taxing, reducing performance by up to 10%.
Sun Shadows can tank the game’s framerates by 15% or higher.
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 lighting which is upgraded to full-fledged global illumination at the “Psycho” quality. Ray traced diffuse lighting takes into account the numerous artificial light sources throughout Night City, and atmospheric light scattered by the sun/moon. The result is superior illumination of objects and surfaces by indirect lighting.
“Psycho“ quality option enables the color properties of the reflecting surfaces. Consequently, the reflected light adopts the color of the reflecting objects, producing more accurate lighting. Unless you’re using path-tracing, this is only used for sunlight with single bounce interactions.
Ray Traced lighting is the most taxing RT setting in the game, reducing framerates by 35-40% at the “Medium” quality, and 50-55% at the “Pyscho” quality preset.
RT Lighting vs Path Tracing
Path Tracing: Overdrive Mode
Cyberpunk’s path tracing mode unifies the lighting pipeline, adding single bounce direct illumination, and multi-bounce diffuse illumination for the hundreds or thousands of light sources in Night City. Consequently, every emissive (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 (overdrive mode) is less scary with frame generation and ray reconstruction (supported on all GeForce RTX GPUs). In 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.
RT Reflections vs Path Tracing
What’s the difference between ray and path-tracing? The two are based on the same principle of tracing how light rays traverse and interact with a scene. Here’s what sets the two apart:
Ray tracing usually traces a single ray per pixel, from the camera (screen) into the scene:
The rays that hit a surface or object, illuminate them, thereby creating shadows or reflections.
The exact triangle intersected by each ray is located and its color is used to determine the lighting for that pixel.
Separate reflection, refraction, and shadow rays are generated for every applicable effect that are further traced until they hit an object.
Gathering this data, the rays then travel back to the light source, where it’s used to calculate the scene’s lighting.
Ray Tracing
Path tracing is similar to ray tracing but differs at the start and the end. While ray tracing casts a single ray per pixel, path tracing casts several rays in random directions through each pixel.
These rays bounce off objects multiple times, across a wider area, tracing the path of many different rays before returning to the source with a lot more lighting data.
However, unlike ray-tracing, only a subset of the rays cast are used to calculate the scene’s lighting.
Using the Monte Carlo simulation, an ideal and more probable number of paths are traced back to the light source.
Path tracing can solve complex lighting scenes, including caustics, particles, and indirect multi-bounce illumination.
Cyberpunk 2077 adds RTXDI (RTX Direct Illumination) with path-tracing. This single-bounce algorithm calculates the lighting of a scene with incredible detail, taking up to a million dynamic light sources into account. As explained, every glossy object capable of reflecting light is treated as a light source. It replaces shadow maps and RT shadows as the only shadowing technique.
RTXDI uses ReSTIR (Reservoir-based Spatio-Temporal Importance Resampling) samples single-bounce direct lighting from innumerous light sources- 65x faster than traditional methods. Thanks to the spatial and temporal reuse of radiance data from nearby pixels, it is capable of tracing unlimited lights with just a few rays per pixel.
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’s not as accurate in some scenes, as it lacks Importance Sampling (IS) and Importance Resampling (IRS).
Recommended for budget GPUs like the RTX 3060, RTX 4060, and the RTX 3060 Ti.
Path Tracing 20 (PT20): Path Tracing 20 combines RTXDI or direct lighting with multi-bounce diffuse lighting or GI. It is backed by IS and RIS, algorithms that target light sources that are most important to a scene (impact the ambient lighting to a much greater degree than the rest), and resample them from previous frames and neighboring pixels.
PT20 looks nearly as good as PT21 (or even better), while 40% faster than vanilla PT.
Recommended for most midrange and high-end PCs.
Path Tracing 21 (PT21): Path Tracing 21 combines ReSTIR GI and RTXDI. The former works by building a reservoir of light samples per pixel (using IS). These are combined with similar samples temporally and spatially (using RIS), and then combined with the reservoirs of past frames. The accumulation of samples produces high quality GI comparable to infinite bounce PT.
Unfortunately, ReSTIR works in screen-space, meaning it only tracks lights visible on the screen which can lead to poor results for objects lit by off-screen lights.
Furthermore, CDPR hasn’t implemented it perfectly, leading to sub-par results at a high performance cost.
Path Tracing Next: Path Tracing Next leverages ReGIR (Grid-based Reservoirs), an evolution of ReSTIR. While ReSTIR samples lights in screen-space, ReGIR constructs a 3D grid made up of cells similar to voxels. Each cell contains multiple reservoirs (light samples), ranging from 64 to 1,024. Pixels are shaded using the stored light sample (reservoir) of the nearby cell using RIS, 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 and distant object.
Users with top-end GPUs, like the RTX 4080 and the RTX 4090 are encouraged to use it.
Upscaling and Frame Generation Performance
Upscaling and frame generation are quite useful in Cyberpunk 2077, especially if you plan to use ray tracing or path tracing. DLSS “Quality” is ~90% faster than 4K native, while “Balanced” produces 2.25x higher frame rates. The “Performance” preset is 2.64x faster, averaging 95.4 FPS at the RT “Psycho” settings.
FSR 2.2 is slightly slower than DLSS due to ray reconstruction, which improves performance (and quality) on the RTX GPUs.
DLSS 3 “Quality” and frame generation make Cyberpunk 2077 2.75x faster than 4K native, “Balanced” mode increases the lead to 3.30x, while “Performance” is a whopping 3.80x faster.
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) and aliasing.
DLSS and XeSS deal with this using 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 uses an algorithmic approach that can be fine-tuned and adjusted for different scenarios, at times, producing very similar image quality. However, it’s a one-fits-all approach, and often struggles with thin objects/geometry.
Ray tracing uses a similar technique to make up for the relatively fewer rays cast, at times less than the number of onscreen pixels. The raw output from limited rays is noise, and often lacking detail in between pixels. Denoisers make up for this by temporally accumulating pixels, and interpolating them spatitally to blend neighoring pixels. The result is a (mostly) accurate image.
Ray Reconstruction gives DLSS an edge in ray tracing, producing higher-quality reflections at the same performance. Unlike FSR/XeSS which use hand-tuned denoisers with temporal upsampling, 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 VRAM (graphics memory) at 1080p “Ultra,” 1440p ups it to 8.7 GB, while 4K peaks at 9.64 GB. Enabling ray-tracing significantly increases the VRAM usage across three resolutions. We’re looking at 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 GPU-busy deviation (frame time/GPU-busy time) of 30% at 1080p “Ultra.”
1080p Ultra1080p RT Ultra
Enabling ray-tracing makes the game more GPU-limited, with a GPU-busy deviation of 10%.
1440p Ultra
Higher resolutions produce lower GPU-busy figures (lower still with ray-tracing).
Best Settings for Cyberpunk 2077 in 2024
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
Ultra
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
Ultra
Color Precision
High
High
High
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 for Cyberpunk 2077 + 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. GeForce RTX 40 series players can max out the ray-tracing settings as frame generation provides an ample performance boost.
High-end (4K)
Mid-range (1440p)
Low-end (1080p)
CPU
Core i7-13700K/Ryzen 7 7800X3D
Core i5-13600K/Ryzen 5 7600X
Less than: Core i5-12400/Ryzen 5 3600
GPU
RTX 4070 Ti Super/RX 7900 XT
RTX 4070/RX 7800 XT
Less than: RTX 4060/RX 7600
Memory
32GB (dual-channel)
16GB (dual-channel)
Less than: 16GB (dual-channel)
Optimized Settings
RTX 4090
RTX 4080
RTX 4070 Ti
RTX 4070 S
RTX 4070
RTX 3080 Ti
Resolution
4K
4K
4K
1440p|4K
1440p|4K
1440p|4K
Target FPS
90 FPS
60 FPS+
60 FPS
60 FPS
60 FPS
60 FPS
Field of View
100
100
100
100
100
100
Motion Blur
*
*
*
*
*
*
Depth of Field
*
*
*
*
*
*
Texture Quality
High
High
High
High
High
High
Texture Filtering
AF 16x
AF 16x
AF 16x
AF 16x
AF 16x
AF 16x
LOD
High
High
High
High
High
High
Contact Shadows
On
On
On
On
On
On
Improved Facial Lighting
On
On
On
On
On
On
Local Shadow Mesh Quality
High
High
High
High
High
High
Local Shadow Quality
High
High
High
High
High
High
Cascaded Shadows Range
High
High
High
High
High
High
Cascaded Shadows Resolution
High
High
High
High
High
High
Distant Shadow Resolution
High
High
High
High
High
High
Volumetric Cloud Quality
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Volumetric Fog Resolution
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Maximum Dynamic Decals
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Screen Space Reflections Quality
Psycho
Psycho
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Subsurface Scattering Quality
High
High
High
High
High
High
Ambient Occlusion
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
High
Color Precision
High
High
High
High
High
High
Mirror Quality
High
High
High
High
High
High
DLSS Upscaling
Balanced
Balanced
Perform
Balanced
Balanced
Balanced|Performance
*don’t impact performance notably
Ray Tracing
RTX 4090
RTX 4080
RTX 4070 Ti
RTX 4070 S
RTX 4070
RTX 3080 Ti
Ray-traced Reflections
–
–
–
On
On
On
Ray-traced Local Shadows
–
–
–
On
On
On
Ray-traced Sun Shadows
–
–
–
On
On
On
Ray-traced Lighting
–
–
–
Psycho
Psycho
Medium
Path Tracing
On
On
On
On|Off
On|Off
On|Off
Frame Generation
On
On
On
On
On
Off
Cyberpunk 2077 Settings for Low-end PC: RTX 3060, RTX 3060 Ti & RTX 4060
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.