Cyberpunk 2077 has turned out to be an exciting game. The crowded streets and numerous crowds bring Knight City to life like a real metropolis. Real-time ray tracing technology allows you to feel as if you are in reality, not in the game.
All this beauty does not come for nothing. Even the most powerful modern graphics cards can give up if you set the graphics level to the highest. In this article, Ethan Revere from https://entropia.pro/ will give tips on optimizing Cyberpunk 2077 settings. These tips will allow you to squeeze the most out of your computer's capabilities. You will be able to lower some settings without much loss of quality, and leave the rest at maximum.
Even the most advanced flagship graphics card GeForce RTX 3090 at a high price has problems to maintain a stable 60 fps at 4K resolution on maximum graphics settings. Our tips can help you get the results you need.
Turn off the FPS counter. Let's start with the simplest tip. If you are a computer game enthusiast who likes to monitor the speed of each game, and for this purpose he has a frame rate displayed in the corner of the screen, turn off the display of this parameter. Only then start changing the settings.
Frame Rate Counter. Remove the frame rate counter in the corner of the screen. In this example it is created by GeForce Experience software, there is no built-in counter inside the game.
Not everyone will like this tip. From the feel of it, the game runs fine at 45fps despite using the first person view, especially if you use a monitor with adaptive sync (FreeSync or G-Sync technologies) to smooth out the differences between the refresh rate of your monitor and the game's FPS. This is an open-world game, not a shooter, although you can forget about that during shoot-outs.
Maximum level graphics add a lot of textures to the game. It's a shame to turn them off because you don't see the number - 60 - in the corner of the screen. Do not look at that number and adjust the game as you feel comfortable.
Nvidia and AMD have already released drivers optimized for Cyberpunk 2077. Download them from the website of one of these two companies, depending on your video card. Or you can download the latest version of the drivers in the AMD Radeon or Nvidia GeForce Experience settings.
Before reducing the graphics level, use the resolution scaling that the developers at CD Projekt Red have built into the game. It works great and can be found in the graphics settings menu.
Nvidia RTX graphics cards have DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) technology. It first processes the game at a low resolution, then applies special tensor cores with AI to scale up towards the resolution of your choice. Machine learning helps make the image cleaner. As a result, the frame rate goes up and the quality of the image hardly decreases at all.
DLSS can be considered as a mandatory component if you enable ray tracing in the game. However, the option can be activated without tracing. If your video card supports DLSS, just enable it without much thought.
Often the frame rate increases by almost two times, although it all depends on the specific model of video card and the selected resolution of the game.
If the resolution scaling is not enough to get a high enough frame rate, Cyberpunk 2077 provides additional settings for advanced users in the graphics menu. Only a few of these have a serious impact on performance.
Setting the reflection quality value to low or completely off increases the frame rate by at least 10%. If you reduce the resolution of volumetric fog to a low value, the increase is about the same. The appearance of the game will be worse, especially if you reduce the reflections in the night city with rain and neon lights. But not as worse as if you reduce all graphics to medium or low.
There are numerous shadow settings in the game. Reducing the quality of these shadows will be able to noticeably affect speed in many games, not just this one. Admittedly, each particular setting has little effect on performance improvement, whereas the presence of shadows makes the image more realistic. If you lower all shadow settings to a low setting, you can get another 10% increase in performance. You can start with background shading (Ambient Occlusion), which will give about 5%.
Some gamers talk about a noticeable increase in performance when reducing the resolution of cascading shadows, but the increase is not observed for all. Again, much depends on your computer components.
The main component of your computer in games is the graphics card, but no game is not without a processor. Especially large-scale game with an open world. The speed of the drive also plays a role. The game has settings for them. For some reason they are located in the menu "gameplay".
Big games like this go best when you have a solid-state drive, because there is constant data loading. Once you enter Cyberpunk 2077, you won't see any loading screens, only when you move quickly. The game is best installed on an SSD, where it will take up 70GB. If you don't have that option, turn on the Slow HDD Mode setting.
The open worlds of large games with numerous characters put a great strain on the CPU. Different computer configurations have shown that the more processor cores, the better. Naturally, the faster the cores, the better. In tests on a 5GHz Intel Core i7-8700K processor, changing the Crowd Density parameter from high to low showed no noticeable change.
If you put an RTX 3090 graphics card in a computer with a slower Ryzen 1800X processor with noticeably lower single-threaded performance, however, changing this setting at 4K resolution adds 5-8 fps. That translates to a performance gain of about 15%.
"Crowd density" enhances the atmosphere of the game, so it's best not to lower it unnecessarily.
Cyberpunk can be scaled down so that the game runs on weaker computers with lower picture quality. If your computer still can't handle it, there's something else you can do. The Nvidia GeForce Now cloud gaming service allows you to play Cyberpunk 2077, which you bought from Steam, GOG, Epic Games Store. This service connects to your accounts in these stores and allows you to run the games you bought there. Saves are stored in the cloud and you can access them from your computer.
The GeForce Now service should deliver 60fps at 1080p resolution. The service is free to use, and buying a $5/month Founders plan will give ray tracing support that even the most powerful graphics cards can't handle. It's easier to play Cyberpunk 2077 on this service than to spend a lot of money to upgrade your computer. The game is also available on competing services like Stadia and Shadow, but there is no free access.
If your graphics card is having trouble with Cyberpunk 2077, reducing the field of view can increase the frame rate. The graphics processor can process fewer pixels.
This is especially true if your graphics card has a small amount of memory.
CD Project offers 3D vertical/horizontal streaming in the game to help with limited memory, especially in the saturated sections of the game. The game doesn't load anything that isn't in the character's field of view. If you're looking at skyscrapers, the street below them is unloaded from memory, and vice versa. This reduces video memory consumption without reducing image quality or worsening the sense of zoom and perspective.
