Cyberpunk 2077 appears to have gotten off on the wrong foot for both console and PC owners. Graphically the game is beautiful. However, its quirks sometimes make the game difficult. During my time playing it, I noticed several FPS drops, which is a pain when it comes to any game, but on PC it always feels worse. This is how you can fix it.
What are the best settings to use in Cyberpunk 2077 2.0?
Despite Cyberpunk 2077’s poor optimization, you can still make some adjustments to the settings to see an improvement when it comes to frames. When you are in the Main menuHead to Settings and apply these changes:
| Quick preset | Habit |
| AMD Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) | In |
| texture quality | Medium (Low looks downright bad and High has minimal improvements while absorbing more energy) |
| DLSS Super Resolution | High |
| DLSS Sharpness | Quality |
| DLSS ray reconstruction | Only available if route tracking is activated |
| nVidia DLAA | Off |
| AMDFSR 2.1 | Off |
| Intel XESS 1.1 | Off |
| Field of view | 90 |
| film grain | Off (this only affects scenes) |
| Chromatic aberration | Off |
| depth of field | Off |
| Lens flare | Off |
| Motion blur | Off |
| Contact Shadows | Off |
| Improved facial light geometry | In |
| Anisotropy | 4x for low-end PC and 16x for high-end PC |
| Local shade mesh quality | High |
| cascading shadows Range | Half |
| Distant shadow resolution | High |
| Volumetric fog resolution | Low |
| Volumetric cloud quality | High |
| Max Dynamic Decals | High |
| Quality of screen space reflections | Half |
| Subsoil dispersion quality | Half |
| Ambient occlusion | Low |
| Color accuracy | Half |
| Volumetric cloud quality | Half |
| Mirror quality | Half |
| Gamma correction | 1.36 (so that Night City is less overexposed during the day) |
| Level of Detail (LOD) | Half |
| Crowd density | Low (there are enough NPCs as it is, and the higher the number of people, the greater the impact it will have on your GPU and FPS) |
| virtual synchronization | Off |
| Slow motion of hard drive | Off |
Related: Can you play Cyberpunk 2077 on Xbox One S?
For a graphics-intensive game, I realize it can seem confusing to see many of the settings set to Medium. This is because the visual difference between Medium and High is usually negligible, while the performance impact is much greater than what you get in return.
There are a few other additional options you can implement, depending on the brand of GPU you have.
NVIDIA
If you have an Nvidia GPU, you can download Nvidia Ansel and do the following:
- Inside Nvidia Ansel, go to GeForce Experience > Settings > Photo Mode/Game Filterand enable it
- Open Cyberpunk 2077, press Alt + Z to open Ansel and change settings
For detailsuse these percentages:
- Sharpen – 10%
- Clarity – 6%
- HDR Toning – 0%
- Bloom – 6%
For coloruse these percentages:
- dye color – 0%
- Dye intensity – 0%
- Temperature – 0
- Vibrance – 21.6
amd
If you have an AMD GPU, you can download AMD adrenaline (Radeon Software) and do the following:
- Gonna Settings
- Gonna Graphics
- Change the Graphics profile to electronic sports
- Make sure Image sharpness is enabled and set to a higher value 75%
You can also go back to Cyberpunk’s internal settings and enable FidelityFX Static CAS.
These settings should drastically improve your FPS and set you up for a more enjoyable experience. The graphical intensity of the game shouldn’t differ much from using lower settings, and in return you’ll encounter far fewer frame drops as well as fewer GPU performance issues.
Related: Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 Free cars and where to get them
Cyberpunk 2077 Update 2.0 Revised System Requirements
Cyberpunk 2077 Update 2.0 brought many new features to almost every aspect of the game, and the performance update is no exception. The most notable difference after patch 2.0 is the drop of HDD support. This means that you must have an SSD to play Cyberpunk 2077, as the game no longer supports older hard drives. This change seems to be a trend in all the newer games recently, and Starfield also has a similar prerequisite. I still consider it a worthwhile investment, as Cyberpunk 2077 is now a much better game than it was at launch. Below is a detailed breakdown of all the PC-specific changes related to graphics settings after Update 2.0.
- Updated PC system requirements. An SSD is now required to run the game.
- Added support for NVIDIA DLSS 3.5, which introduces DLSS Ray Reconstruction, a feature that improves the quality of Ray Traced effects. GeForce RTX graphics card required. The option is available in Settings → Graphics in the NVIDIA DLSS section. DLSS 3.5 is only available if Path Tracing is enabled. To ensure that DLSS Ray Reconstruction works correctly on your PC, update your NVIDIA Game Ready driver to version 537.42 at least.
- [AMD SMT] Introduced a new AMD Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) switch located in Settings → Game → Performance. It allows you to set SMT to Disabled (physical cores only), Enabled (all logical cores), or Automatic (ensuring average performance in different locations and game situations is optimal). This change was implemented in cooperation with AMD and is based on testing on both sides.
- The Crowd Density setting has been moved from the Gameplay tab to the Graphics tab. Additionally, Crowd Density is now tied to Quick Charts Presets and will change based on the selected preset, but can be customized independently if needed.
- As PC system requirements have been updated, running the game on an SSD is now a requirement on the Steam Deck.
- Steam Deck graphics profile updated to improve frame rate stability
Looking for more Cyberpunk 2077 content? Check out the new cyberware in Cyberpunk Phantom Liberty and How to Time Skip in Cyberpunk 2077, here at MyFullGames!