LogInHardware Unboxed analyzed every parameter in the game and suggested the best solution.
With Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty finally out, I'm sure you want to enjoy the best picture possible without overworking your PC. The YouTube channel Hardware Unboxed has done the hard work for us all and presented the best settings for most systems.
The team compared different parameters so you can clearly see how they affect the visuals. They also showed how much lowering or turning them off would improve the game's performance.
Image credit: Hardware Unboxed, CD PROJEKT RED
Interestingly, changing texture quality or the level of detail doesn't do much for how well Cyberpunk 2077 runs. What does have an impact on the game is the lighting. Shadows and ray tracing will make your experience prettier but more difficult for your PC to handle. Hardware Unboxed found out that contact shadows, local shadow quality, and cascaded shadows resolution can bump the performance up to 4% each; it doesn't seem like much, but together they will result in smoother gameplay.
You might also want to lower the volumetric fog resolution to get an extra 8% boost, but the game-changing settings here are screen space reflections (which eat up to 32% of power), ray-traced lighting (up to 48%), and path tracing, or full ray tracing, (74%).
Image credit: Hardware Unboxed, CD PROJEKT RED
Image credit: Hardware Unboxed, CD PROJEKT RED
If you don't want to get lost in all these numbers, you could choose one of the presets Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty provides. Hardware Unboxed says that the Low settings will give you a 77% performance boost compared to the Ultra quality, while Ray Tracing Overdrive will drop it 74%.
Image credit: Hardware Unboxed, CD PROJEKT RED
According to the video, you can enjoy nice visuals and play comfortably without sacrificing too much if you put half of the parameters to High and the other half to Medium, with some exceptions. Here is what it should look like:
You should disable ray tracing for the best results, but if you want to have it on, first tweak reflections, then local shadows, set the lighting to medium, and enable path tracing only if you have a high-end PC.
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