Cyberpunk 2077 – Cyberpunk Graphics Optimization

Guide for Cyberpunk 2077 – Cyberpunk Graphics Optimization

My Current PC Setup and Other Info

This is just so you know how I gauge these settings. If you have a similar system specification then you can expect a similar performance. If you have something better then you can expect better performance.

CPU: AMD Ryzen R7 5800X (at stock)
Cooler: be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 4
RAM: Trident Z neo 32GB @3600Hz CL18 (2x2x8GB kits)
GPU: Sapphire Pulse RX 5600 XT (Updated VBIOS 1.03, ‘Performance’ mode)
GPU Driver: 20.12.1 (WHQL)
Storage: Aorus Gen4 1TB M.2 SSD (System drive) + PNY XLR8 CS3030 1TB M.2 SSD (Game drive)
Display Resolution: 1920 x 1080 (1080p)

Yes this means no RTX (boo hoo)

Game is patched to 1.04

You need to click the images to get a better view and see more details. Screenshots generally don’t have good compression so some details are lost but you’ll still see some differences here and there. I’ve also placed some FPS alongside the some of the screenshots to give an indication of performance.

THIS GAME NEEDS MORE THAN 4GB of VRAM at 1080p
I’m not saying 4GB will not work. It’s just not optimal and you’ll be bottlenecked in a lot of scenes.

Textures and Presets

Texture Settings

You won’t be able to change texture settings once you’re in the map. The only way you can change texture settings is in the main menu.

main menu

in map

Note the missing option under ‘Quick Preset’

Basically you’ll want this at ‘High’ unless you’ve maxed out your VRAM already. Difference between ‘High’ and ‘Medium’ is noticeable especially if you have a good display.

Summary

• Keep at ‘High’
• Performance impact is minimal unless you’ve maxed out your GPU’s VRAM

We’ll get back to Textures in a moment.

Currently, Cyberpunk has this table to help you determine what GPU you need to run what settings at what resolution. (Say “what” again)

Although this serves as a guide. There’s a lot of factors to consider. For example, CPU bottlenecks are apparent here. Also, I can tell you right now a GTX 1060 + AMD Ryzen 3 3200G won’t do 60FPS at ‘High’ so it’s better for you not to base your buying options or settings on this table.

NOW, let’s talk about the presets one by one.

Quick Preset

This is a good and quick gauge to determine if your GPU can handle the settings you throw at it.

To be honest. The game looks really good even at ‘Low’ settings.

90 Frames Per Second in this scene.

Probably because I have textures on ‘High’ in this example. See it doesn’t look bad right?

Now here it is with textures on ‘Low’

Yes I know the NPCs changed but it still looks good right? This reminds me a lot of Deus Ex HR and Mankind Divided.

The Bad
Game definitely eats more than 4GB of VRAM even with everything on low at 1080p. Not sure if a lower resolution will help.

And just for the heck of it. This is ‘Low’ preset with ‘Medium’ textures.

Yes the NPCs changed again but it’s hard to tell the difference between these settings because there’s other things that factor in with the texture settings (like Anisotropy). Also you’ll only really notice it if you move close to objects to inspect them.

For the rest of the guide I will use ‘High’ textures just because performance impact is very minimal but like I said, it eats up more VRAM.

77 Frames Per Second in this scene.

Streetlights on the right side no longer “spill” vs ‘Low’ and ‘Medium’
Sharper details on the walls, cars, etc., vs ‘Low’ and ‘Medium’

60 Frames Per Second in this scene.

34 Frames Per Second in this scene.

Other Examples

87 FPS

70 FPS

55 FPS

49 FPS

The Breakdown
If you think ‘Ultra’ looks worse than ‘High’ and even ‘Medium’ it’s because of the additional post-processing this preset has that makes it more blurry and grainy. Both of which I despise. Also ‘Low’ looks good but it’s very dark. This game doesn’t give you a flashlight and some levels are dark already at high settings so good luck if you keep your settings on ‘Low’.

Now you could see the performance impact of these presets. From ‘Low’ to ‘Medium’ you’re losing about 14.45% of performance. Then from ‘Medium’ to ‘High’ you’re losing about 22.1% of performance. Then finally, from ‘High’ to ‘Ultra’ you’re losing an incredible 43.33% performance in this one particular scene.

Of course, your performance will vary from the card, to the display resolution, to your current place in the map. But this scene should represent what you’ll get mostly in missions with it being inside a bar with lots of lights, smokey places, lots of objects. There’s only a few missions wherein there’s not a lot to render.

Of course you can say “There’s not much difference between ‘High’ and ‘Medium’ so I’ll just go with ‘Medium” and that’s all fine. But if you have a couple more headroom, in my case I still have about 17 frames before it drops to 60, you can fine-tune it further to give you an optimal experience!

Basic Section and Post-Processing

With the exception of ‘Field of View’, basically all these settings make the game more “cinematic” in which I am not a fan of. But I will still try to detail each and give examples.

For this section, I will be using the ‘Ultra’ Preset but will have the following settings at ‘Off’ (except for ‘Field of View’) to showcase the difference.

The settings for this start at 70 then goes up to 100 with increments of 5 in between. I won’t show everything since that’s nonsense and a waste of time. I will show examples of 70, 85, and 100 degrees.

70 Degrees

85 Degrees

100 Degrees

Just from my personal opinion, 80-85 degrees is the sweet spot. It feels more natural especially when you walk up to objects.

How does this affect performance?
– The higher the setting, the more objects will be presented in the player’s field of view.

The rest of the section will proceed with a FOV setting of 85

You like grain?

This adds the grainy effect you see on movies. Originally this is a natural occurrence when using a medium like film (the actual material). Nowadays it’s used to hide artifacts or make things look more “cinematic”. Yuck.

You want things to look crispy clear?
– Turn this off

How is this even a feature? Look at the edges of the image, blurry with some sort of color mishap. Chromatic aberration is a naturally occurring phenomenon when using lenses, what happens is light gets refracted more on the edge of the lens and that would make you see some color separation on images. This happens with telescopes but in film this is a bad because it just shows how bad the quality of the lens is. Why? Just why?

Why?
– Turn it off

The picture above is a bad example. But you’re supposed to know what Depth of Field is. In real life, when you focus your view on an object or part of an object, the sides get all blurry and fuzzy, basically out of focus. You’ll notice it a lot in cutscenes.

You like cinematic cutscenes?
– If so, turn this on

This picture may look like a bad example but this is actually a good example on how mild the lens flares are in this game. It’s not blinding like watching Transformers.

You like Transformers?
– If so, turn this on

“Everything’s so blurry
And everyone’s so fake”

“Can you take it all away?
Can you take it all away?
Well you shoved it in my face
This pain you gave to me”
– Turn it off

Thankfully, these settings have minimal effect on performance. So on or off, depends on your preference!

Advanced Graphics Settings

It’s really hard to go into detail on this because it requires a lot of screenshots. I may or may not update this section with regards to examples but I’ll do my best to explain the following settings and impact on performance.

In each section I will try to provide my best a*sumption of impact on FPS but please note other hardware configurations will have varied results.

I’ve tested this during daytime since the shadow settings have something to do with the sun. Also, I will crank up each setting one by one. I will be using ‘Ultra’ preset and turn each setting down one by one.

Responsible for enhanced shadow rendering and adding detail that is not available in normal settings. All ‘Basic’ settings will be turned ‘Off’ as well.

Performance impact: Low *if you have shadows at ‘Low’. I think the performance impact of this will increase a lot as you crank up your other shadows settings.
Visual impact: Low

Improves the fidelity of facial animations.

Performance impact: Very Low
Honestly you’ll only notice this up close and in cutscenes. Just turn this on.
Visual impact: Low (usually)

The quality of textures seen at oblique angles.
This by the way is supposed to be ‘Anisotropic Filtering’…

Performance impact: Very Low
Visual impact: High

I’m still wondering why games have an option to change this when most if not all GPUs can handle x16 just fine…

The quality of meshes used for casting shadows, Corresponds to the consistency between the shadow and the light source.

Performance impact: Low
Visual impact: Medium

The level of shadow detail from artificial light sources.

Performance impact: Low
Visual impact: Medium

How far you can see shadows cast by the sun.

This has some significant effect on shadows cast at a distance or shadows that should be there. Basically shadows from buildings are missing on ‘Low’ and you’ll notice this a lot while driving.

Performance impact: Low
Visual impact: High

High – Contact Shadows are ‘Off’

Low – Contact Shadows are ‘Off’

High – Contact Shadows are ‘On’

The level of detail in shadows cast by the sun.

Performance impact: Low
Visual impact: Medium

The level of detail in shadows cast by the sun on distant objects.

Performance impact: Low
Visual impact: Medium

The quality of fog around the player (due to dust or other particle matter in the air) that produces realistic beams of sunlight and color gradients within a scene.

Performance impact: Medium
Visual impact: Medium

Enables you to adjust volumetric cloud quality.

Performance impact: Low
Visual impact: Low

The amount of simultaneously-illuminated dynamic decals.

I think this setting have more impact at night.

Performance impact: Medium
Visual impact: Medium

Determines the quality of reflections in the game. Higher quality corresponds to improved image detail and smoothness.

Performance impact: High
Visual impact: Medium

Determines the quality of lighting on human skin.

Performance impact: Low
Visual impact: Low

Screen Space Ambient Occlusion produces natural shadows in areas where regular shadow maps lack precision and incoming light is blocked by nearby environmental geometry (e.g. inside narrow gaps or corners). Setting on higher quality preset will increase sampling rate and improve ambient occlusion, but use more GPU (graphics card power).

This is SSAO not HBAO or HBAO+. I think SSAO tends to favor Radeon cards sometime ago, but this isn’t a problem anymore for modern day graphics cards even at high settings.

Performance impact: Low
Visual impact: Medium

Higher color precision improves overall image quality and reduces color gradient banding.

Performance impact: Very Low
Visual impact: Low

Determines image quality of in-game mirrors.

How often do you look at yourself in the mirror? Honestly. This setting only affects that so most of the time you won’t take a performance hit but I will put in ‘Medium’ for now because reflections are a thing in this game.

Performance impact: High
Visual impact: High

High

Medium

Low

Determines the level of detail in the game’s graphics.

Performance impact: Very Low
Visual impact: Medium

Just because some items I’ve tagged as ‘Low’ on performance impact doesn’t mean you should crank it up to Ultra. As I said the game looks good even on ‘Low’. Obviously a mixture of these settings will stack up one by one even if it’s tagged as ‘Low’. Performance will also vary from place to place.

Some settings should be kept at ‘High’ or max like Anisotropy, Ambient Occlusion, Color Precision, and Level of Detail (LOD) while the rest you can keep at ‘Low’. Don’t turn the other settings to ‘Off’ since it really is noticeable.

I suggest you either start with ‘Low’ preset and crank the settings up like those with noticeable visual impact or start on ‘Ultra’ preset and crank it down one by one.

In the next section I will show an example of what I’m using and in various areas with screenshots.

Optimization Samples

Below are some screenshots of the presets – ‘Medium’, ‘High’, ‘Ultra’, and the last one is a mix between ‘Medium’ and ‘High’ to what I think looks better than even ‘Ultra’ (because post-processing effects suck).

Sample 1

70 FPS

56 FPS

51 FPS

60 FPS

Sample 2

67 FPS

53 FPS

29 FPS

60 FPS

Sample 3

63 FPS

51 FPS

25 FPS

57 FPS

Sample 4

60 FPS

32 FPS

24 FPS

54 FPS

Sample 5

63 FPS

52 FPS

29 FPS

56 FPS

Medium (Modified) Settings

Basic

• Field of View – 85
• Film Grain – Off
• Chromatic Aberration – Off
• Depth of Field – Off
• Lens Flare – Off
• Motion Blur – Off

Advanced

• Contact Shadows – On
• Improved Facial Lighting Geometry – On
• Anisotropy – 16
• Local Shadow Mesh Quality – Medium
• Local Shadow Quality – Medium
• Cascaded Shadows Range – High
• Cascaded Shadows Resolution – Medium
• Distant Shadows Resolution – High
• Volumetric Fog Resolution – Medium
• Volumetric Cloud Quality – Medium
• Max Dynamic Decals – Medium
• Screen Space Reflections Quality – Medium
• Subsurface Scattering Quality – Medium
• Ambient Occlusion – High
• Color Precision – High
• Mirror Quality – Medium
• Level of Detail (LOD) – High

Ray Tracing and Resolution Scaling

RTX ON!

I don’t have an RTX GPU or RT enabled GPU yet

I will update this section once I do ;(

Performance Mod for AMD Ryzen CPUs

The Issue

I know CDPR has been in cahoots with Nvidia for a long time now but what you guys didn’t know is they’re gimping the performance of AMD Ryzen CPUs. This wouldn’t matter much if you’re already GPU bottlenecked but extra FPS is extra FPS!

I will not go into detail regarding how much FPS you can expect because it varies. You’ll notice better CPU utilization once you’ve done this.

What to do

Download a Hex editor and install it. I used ‘HxD’ as it’s free.

After you install it, open it.

Navigate to Cyberpunk 2077’s installation directory and make a backup of ‘Cyberpunk2077.exe’

Either open the exe (not the copy) via File menu or just drag the exe to your hex editor.

Search for the Hex Value – 75 30 33 C9 B8 01 00 00 00 0F A2 8B C8 C1 F9 08

Replace it by just pasting over – EB 30 33 C9 B8 01 00 00 00 0F A2 8B C8 C1 F9 08

And just save it. If done properly the game should work without issues and you’ll see your CPU utilization go up. If you made a mistake just use the backup you made earlier and try again… or not.

This is all that we can say about Cyberpunk 2077 – Cyberpunk Graphics Optimization for now. I hope this post helped you. If there is anything that we should add, please let us know via comment below. See you soon!