Cyberpunk 2077: PC graphics perf benchmark review - Article - Guide - Review

Cyberpunk 2077
PC graphics performance review and analysis with 30 GPUs

It's probably the most hyped-up title of the year, but the wait is finally over; Cyberpunk 2077 from CD Projekt RED (the makers of the outstanding Witcher Games) has made its way towards the PC. And yeah, what a game and what a feast for the eyes. We'll check it out in a PC graphics performance and PC gamer way. We'll test the game on the PC platform relative to graphics card performance with the latest AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards. Many graphics cards are being tested and benchmarked. We'll test the game on the PC platform relative to graphics card performance with the latest AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards. Cyberpunk 2077 is an open-world, action-adventure story set in Night City, a megalopolis obsessed with power, glamour, and body modification. You play as V, a mercenary outlaw going after a one-of-a-kind implant that is the key to immortality. You can customize your character’s cyberwar, skillset, and playstyle, and explore a vast city where the choices you make shape the story and the world around you. 

Cyberpunk 2077, as we all know, has NVIDIA written all over it. They had such a say in things that at release time, only NVIDIA RTX graphic cards will get support for Raytracing and DLSS 2.0. And that is a true selling point for this game. AMD Radeon X 6000 series raytracing support will follow later. When DXR is enabled, billboards and other illuminated surfaces and objects will brighten their surroundings with naturally colored lighting, and the sun and moon will realistically illuminate Night City. In Cyberpunk 2077, ray-traced reflections are used on all surfaces and can trace ranges for up to several kilometers, enabling realistic reflections across vast view distances.

They are present on both opaque and transparent objects and surfaces to simulate the way light reflects from glossy and metal surfaces by tracing a single bounce of reflection rays against the scene. Unlike screen space techniques that only reflect what's on-screen, ray-traced reflections incorporate the entire scene around the character and can accurately represent objects outside the camera view or facing away from the camera. Besides, ray-traced reflections have vastly improved fidelity and don't suffer from other immersion-harming image quality artifacts and issues seen when using screen space techniques. Ray tracing enables developers to bring pixel-perfect shadows to games, free from the compromises and limitations of shadow maps. In Cyberpunk 2077, directional shadows from sun and moonlight are added to the game, based on the strength of light, scattering of light through clouds, and other factors. From that point of view, we'll look at the game from a traditional shader/rasterizer point of view, but we'll also include some results with DirectX Raytracing enabled. Since DXR is part of DX12, the game will only be compatible with PCs that use Windows 10, or Windows 7 with the latest updates that added DirectX 12 support. The game looks very nice, detailed, and rich in detail, even with last-gen graphics cards and no Raytracing, that has to be stated.

Multiple graphics cards are being tested and benchmarked.  You will need a reasonably modern PC with at least a mainstream graphics card to run the game nicely. This article will cover benchmarks in the sense of average framerates; we'll look at all popular resolutions scaling from Full HD (1920x1080), WQHD (2560x1440), and of course, Ultra HD. UHDTV (3840x2160) pixels, which are four times as many pixels as 1920x1080.  We test with the game based on the optimized and available AMD Radeon driver (download) and Nvidia, their GeForce WHQL driver (download). We'll test the game on the PC platform relative to graphics card performance with the AMD/NVIDIA graphics card drivers. With this title, we'll also move towards a new test platform, based on AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, currently the fastest gaming processor your money can get you.