Cyberpunk 2077: PC graphics perf benchmark review - Image Quality and System requirements

Image quality settings and benchmark system

We use a run with Ultra image quality settings for this game, the highest possible quality mode. Cyberpunk 2077 is based on CD Projekt's in-house RED R6 Engine; The Witcher 3 used R4. It solely relies on  DirectX 12 as an API. Once you start the game, you can look at the extensive options menu. With a preset screen resolution of 2,560 × 1,440 and RTX 3090 Cyberpunk 2077 immediately suggests ultra settings, including ultra ray tracing, and DLSS set to "Automatic."

Sometimes hard to spot in-game, but when you see it, Hybrid Raytracing looks fabulous when visible.

For AMD Fidelity-FX, sharpness filtering for image sharpening is listed. Most of the other options are maximum with the ultra preset, but the screen space reflections and the complete ray tracing lighting (GI plus ambient obscuration) can be set one level higher. As mentioned on the previous page, ray tracing effects are only available for Nvidia hardware at launch, but a later patch will also enable ray tracing on AMD's new 6800/6900 GPUs.  A later patch will enable ray tracing on AMD's new Navi-21 GPUs.  We leave the settings on the ultra-preset.

Once we enable and test RTX, we select Ultra - Reflections, Shadows, and lighting. We wanted to disabled Shadows, but that made performance pretty much crash, so we left it ON. DLSS, the default, is set up in some sort of balanced mode; we demand the best DLSS, and enable quality mode. It would be best if you did not accept anything less. There's a lot to tweak, alright, so additional performance is there. You need to wonder if you need stuff like film grain enabled.

Test environment (system specification)