Last week CDPR released Update 2.0 for Cyberpunk 2077 this new update serves as an overhaul of the whole game introducing new mechanics and major gameplay improvements and alongside Update 2.0 , CDPR also
released the first and probably the last expansion for the game , Phantom Liberty , which
introduces a new city district called Dogtown and in terms of visuals , it's evident that
this expansion has made some noticeable enhancements , particularly when it comes to
the geometric complexity , each area in Dogtown is packed with a ton of geometry and details , which significantly enrich the game's environments and makes Dogtown more captivating to explore.
and in today's video , we'll revisit the game's graphics settings in this new area and compare
the visual and performance impact of each one. so without any further ado , let's get started. Now let's kickoff with a quick performance comparison between version 1.63 and 2.0 in terms of GPU performance we can see that there is no significant difference between the previous version and the new one.
however , when it comes to the CPU
performance , it's a whole different story update 2.0 is more CPU intensive
and here we can see that the previous version runs around 25% better compare to the current version
and I suspect that the new Police AI system that was introduced with update 2.0 alongside
many improvements to the NPC reactions could be the reason behind this
difference in CPU performance. speaking of CPU performance , this new update
introduced a new setting under gameplay called AMD Simultaneous Multithreading or SMT , which
makes the game utilize all available Cores and threads when running on an AMD CPU
and here with the Ryzen 5 5600x we can see that enabling SMT improves the performance by around 12% when CPU limited. so make sure this setting is ON if you
have an AMD CPU that supports SMT. Now let's move on to Image Quality and here nothing really changed compared to the previous versions. TAA still has a ton of ghosting and using DLAA can clean this problem and provide much cleaner image at native resolution and performance wise enabling
DLAA can costs around 8% however for some reason when using Ultra or Psycho Screen Space Reflections , enabling DLAA can costs up to 48% which is insane.
therefor if you want to enable DLAA , I recommend using High or Lower options for Screen Space Reflections. when it comes to upscaling ,
the game now supports XeSS and here when comparing the
Standard DP4A XeSS Model to FSR2 we can see that XeSS looks more stable and has less shimmering compared to FSR 2 however both XeSS and DLSS have issues when it comes to handling rainy weather here we can see that DLSS failed to
reconstruct objects behind the rain drops. exposing the raw pixels of the game. and XeSS smears the rain drops which makes the rain look inaccurate unlike FSR 2. Now when it comes to which one you should choose I think if you have an RTX GPU , DLSS is the obvious choice and if not , XeSS can overall deliver
better image quality compared to FSR2 but keep in mind that this is the Standard DP4A model and it's unlikely to provide a similar level of performance as FSR2. This new update introduced a new DLSS feature called Ray Reconstruction which is an AI-driven Model designed to replace all manually-tuned denoisers for various Ray Tracing effects. The idea behind this is to prevent any degradation in quality that typically occurs when using Ray Tracing with DLSS upscaling and According to Nvidia it can
even surpass the quality of native denoisers DLSS Ray Reconstruction work with
all RTX GPUs , However, as of now, it's exclusively compatible with
Path Tracing when DLSS is in use there is currently no official support for Ray Reconstruction when using regular Ray Tracing effects or DLAA. Now here I'm running Path Tracing at 1440p with performance DLSS and we can see that at this low resolution , reflections look better and more stable with Ray reconstruction similar thing here with foliage , and there are numerous instances in
which Ray Reconstruction improves the quality and preserves more details.
however , it's still early days for this technologie and of course it's not perfect , Ray Reconstruction exhibits noticeable smearing and ghosting artifacts around some elements
like here with distant NPCs and it can also change the
appearance of characters faces. but as I said it still early days and
future iterations of this technology will address these limitations.
and performance wise I measured around 6% improvement alongside reduced VRAM
usage when using Ray Reconstruction . Now let's talk about some settings
that still don't have any significant impact on both visuals and performance first we have Improve facial lighting geometry and as you can see here both
options look and perform similarly and similar thing with Subsurface Scattering
Quality which should enhanced the quality of lighting on some surfaces like characters skin but there is no substantial visual or performance difference between Low and High next we have Color Precision , this one also doesn't impact the visuals but using High costs around 2% so Medium is the best option here.
Max Dynamic Decals is another one , you will rarely see the affect of this setting
during normal gameplay as you'll have to unload a weapon extensively in a small
area to notice the impact of this setting and both Low and Ultra have similar performance, so keep this one at Ultra. And the last setting here is Level Of Detail or LOD , which still doesn't do anything as you can see here this house alternate between it's Low and high geometric LOD at the same distance when using Low and High
and performance wise , there is no significant difference. and it's quite disappointing because the LOD in this game is so bad , driving or just running around shows a lot of LOD pop-in which negatively impact the game's presentation and I was hoping that update 2.0 will addressee this problem , but unfortunately
that didn't happened. And with that out of the way
let's take a look at the remaining graphics settings, starting with Textures and Vram wise the game is still perfectly playable with 8GB GPUs at native 1440p and I think even 6GB will be enough for this resolution however textures are not the only
factor that can impact the Vram usage and we'll talk about that later in the video. Next we have Depth Of Field and this one is more noticeable during conversations and cutscenes
and it doesn't have a big impact on performance , so if you like this
effect don't worry and keep it on. Contact Shadows allows some objects to cast shadows which can help ground these objects and give more depth to the scene
and performance wise this setting has negligible impact , so keep it ON.
Anisotropy controls Texture filtering and using higher samples make textures look cleaner when viewed at an oblique angle and as usual this setting
doesn't have any significant performance impact , so here I recommend 16 Next we have local shadow mesh quality , this one controls the geometric quality used to cast sun shadows and not only local shadows.
as you can see here , with Medium and High we get more geometry in these shadows unlike Low and this setting has no significant
performance cost , so here I recommend High. The next shadow setting is Local Shadow Quality , this one controls the resolution and quality of artificial light shadows
and performance wise going from Off to Medium doesn't have any significant impact
but going to High costs around 5% so for this one if you need more performance use
Medium and don't turn off local shadows as doing so will significantly impact the visuals
without any performance gain. Next we have cascaded shadows range , this one controls the draw distance of sun shadows and using higher options enable
more shadows for distant objects and NPCs and Low and Medium perform similarly but going to High costs around 3% , so here I recommend Medium. Cascaded Shadows Resolution controls the sharpness and quality of sun shadows and performance wise there is a noticeable impact only when going to High Shadows so Here I recommend avoiding Low and go for Medium or High Cascaded Shadows. Distant Shadows Resolution is similar to the previous setting but for shadows far away from the camera and here going from low to high
doesn't have any performance impact , so for this one I recommend High Volumetric Fog Resolution controls the quality of volumetric lighting and effect and it's more noticeable in moving volumetric lights like here and performance wise in a scene with a lot of volumetrics , we can see that going from Low to Medium doesn't have any impact but going to High costs around 8% and to Ultra 10% so here for my optimized setting I recommend Medium.
Volumetric Cloud Quality as the name suggests should control the resolution and quality of Volumetric Clouds but similar to the previous versions , there is no visuals difference between Med , High and Ultra despite the fact that using Ultra
can cost an additional 8% and going from OFF to Medium and High costs 8% but during normal gameplay where you're are not looking directly in the sky the performance impact is much smaller so here for this one I recommend at least Medium. Screen Space Reflections Quality is still one of the most demanding settings in this game here going from Off to Low costs around 6% , to Medium 10% , High 16% , Ultra 22% and finally to Psycho 54% and here turning off reflections will negatively impact the visuals giving that the game is filled with reflective surfaces everywhere that's why I recommend at least Medium SSR and if
you have enough performance to spare use High. Ambient Occlusion adds soft shadows to objects
that are in close proximity to one another and as I always say , this is an
essential setting and turning it off can negatively impact the game's visualsand performance wise going from off to low costs around 6% , to Medium 9% and to High 12% so for this one I recommend at least Low or Medium and don't turn off Ambient Occlusion.
Next we have Mirror Quality and this one controls the resolution of Mirror reflections
and performance wise going from Low to Med costs 12% and to High 28%
now Mirrors don't have reflections unless you interact with them and during these
moments there isn't a lot of gameplay involved that's why I recommend High mirror quality. And the last non Ray Tracing setting is Crowd Density which adjust the quantity of NPCs in densely populated areas like here and this setting mainly affect CPU performance as you can see here when CPU limited , going from Low to Medium costs 7% and to High 14% , so giving that the game now is more CPU intensive , first try Medium and if you're still having FPS
drops and low GPU usage use Low Crowd Density. Now let's move on to Ray Tracing starting with Ray Traced Reflections which significantly enhanced reflections when compared to Ultra or Psycho SSR and performance wise enabling RT Reflections from Ultra SSR costs around 36% but
it also significantly increase the Vram usage and the allocated Vram Next we have Ray Traced sun shadows which enhance shadows from the sun as you can see here and performance wise enabling this effect can cost around 22%. Ray Traced Local Shadows is similar to the previous setting but for artificial light shadows and performance wise it costs around 16%. Ray Traced Lighting when enabled provides more accurate global illumination and ambient occlusion and this is the most intensive regular Ray Tracing effect as going from OFF to Medium costs around 37% , to High 40% and to Psycho 45%.
Now if you want to use any regular RT effect I recommend RT reflections , as
this has the biggest impact on the visuals RT shadows are so hard to notice and
RT lighting looks great but it comes with a big cost and it doesn't have the same impact on the visuals as RT reflections. and finally we have Path Tracing , this is a full Ray Tracing mode that replace every aspect of the game's rendering with physically accurate
Lighting , Shadows , Reflections and more. and of course it's so intensive
and only the most powerful GPUs out there can handle this mode
with playable performance. Now based on everything we saw so far , these are my recommended settings let's now quickly compare optimized
settings and Ultra Preset here I'm running the game at native 1440p without DLAA or Ray Tracing on both sides and we can see that on average Optimized settings boost performance by around *45% with minimal impact on the visual quality. and with that we reach the conclusion of this video , thank you so much for watching and for your time if you enjoyed the video leave a like and if not
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