Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty Optimization, The Best Settings to Change on PC!

[Music] welcome back to hardw unboxed with the new cyberpunk 2077 2.0 update and Phantom Liberty expansion we're bringing you a fresh optimization guide that goes through every setting in the game to tell you which settings are worth turning to ultra and which are worth turning down to improve performance we never actually provided an optimization guide when this game launched but now that it's effectively complete and gamers are diving back into the game to see what has been improved better late than never I guess cyberpunk 2077 2.0 is pretty similar to the original release of the game in terms of quality settings although CD project red have added in several features over time including xcss and FSR upscaling as well as a path tracing technology preview the new Dogtown area of the game that's introduced with Phantom Liberty is quite demanding while also being visually stunning so it's this area of the game that we're focusing on for both the visual comparisons and performance data but it can also be similar to other parts of the game so this guide will be useful if you're starting a cyber Punk playthrough from scratch as well this is specifically a GPU optimization video so we're mostly concerned about improving GPU limited performance but we'll talk a little about CPU demanding settings as we go we're benchmarking today with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 470 as performance with rate racing on is right on the edge with an 8 GB GPU so we've bumped it up to 12 GB here while trying to keep the now quite expensive mid-range of graphics card the CPU used for testing is the AMD ryzen 7 7800 x3d with 32 gig of ddr5 6000 cl30 memory on msis MPG x67 carbon Wi-Fi motherboard all game visual captures that you see throughout the video are taken on an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 the beefy Asus Rog STS model and that's so we can provide High frame rate 4K quality comparisons we recommend watching this at YouTube's maximum 4K quality mode and before we get into things each quality setting is split into a visual and performance section the performance data is captured in a benchmark pass at 1440p that's designed to give you a look at the impact of a setting on typical game performance rather than spot checking FPS numbers which isn't as accurate or representative of typical gaming the area we've Ed for benchmarking is in Dogtown walking between an intensive indoor and outdoor section that you'll quickly Discover at the beginning of the expansion the built-in Benchmark was not used I'm going to start with each individual setting and look at the presets at the end there are lots of settings that have very little impact so expect us to Breeze through those I'm also not going to assess upscaling quality in this title we've already covered these Technologies extensively previously and most people are familiar with what they bring you should tune these settings to your liking and resolution though for most Gamers we'd recommend using at least some form of upscaling for an easy performance Improvement like dlss quality or FSR quality modes as an example the texture quality setting impacts the sharpness and Clarity of some in-game textures with lower settings making textures more blurry even on the medium setting you'll notice quite a large reduction in texture Clarity relative to the high setting and on low the game is very blurry not all textures impacted there are some surface level details and dynamic displays that don't seem to be affected but everything else becomes much worse on Lower quality textures I also don't think the texture quality in cyber Punk is especially amazing given the quality of effects in other areas draw distance for textures is pretty weak so ideally the game would come with an ultra setting that really pumps up those textures for those with highend gpus but for now the high setting will have to do when we look at performance it's no surprise to see that the texture setting has little impact when you have enough vram as we do on the RTX 4070 we use for testing I'd strongly recommend keeping this setting on high for most graphics cards and only turn down the setting if you run out of vram such as when playing on a 6 GB GPU 8 gig gpus will largely be fine playing cyber Punk with high textures although with rate tracing enabled at high resolutions like 4K performance can reduce somewhat so the game is very much on the edge with 8 GB gpus 10 or 12 GB appears quite comfortable motion blur is a single toggle that impacts both camera and per object motion blur so unfortunately those settings are not uncoupled and you cannot disable Camera blur while retaining object blur the high and low settings here simply adjust the strength of the blur effect high being more blurry off disables motion blur as expected the implementation of motion blur in cyberpunk is great in that enabling the feature has little to know impact on performance so whether it's worth using will mostly come down to personal preference we always prefer disabling motion blow when playing at a high frame rate although if you are targeting 30 FPS then motion blow will hide the fact the game is running as a slideshow contact Shadows is a straightforward setting with it enabled some objects are able to cast Shadows onto itself or other nearby objects here for example the sandbags are casting Sun Shadows onto itself which increases the realism and depth to the presentation not all objects are impacted but a a surprising number are even though disabling contact Shadows can provide a 3 to 4% performance Improvement I think for most people you'll want to play the game with this setting enabled however if you are interested in a large performance Improvement then turning contact Shadows off is a viable Choice as it doesn't disable all Shadows improved facial lighting geometry is a setting that I couldn't really tell if it was turned on or off both from a visuals and performance perspective I assisted a number of faces in different lighting conditions and it didn't seem to make much difference so I'd leave this setting on an isotropy affects the clarity of textures when viewed at off angles I didn't spot a huge difference between the setting on 16 or 8 but dropping down to four does reduce the crispness of Textures in some circumstances it's minor but certainly noticeable using the setting on one makes the game look awful so clearly this is not the best way to play the game and shouldn't be used unless you are also turning down texture quality as why bother running High textures if you're not going to filter them properly luckily in most games an isotropy has little to no performance impact unless you turn it to one which delivers up to a 3% performance Improvement unless you have low-end Hardware I would recommend keeping this setting on the maximum available level local Shadow mesh quality affects the quality of geometric detail used to cast Shadows from artificial light sources which is quite the niche feature I found it quite difficult to tell the difference between the three quality options although in this scene I did notice that switching from high medium to low did reduce the shadow accuracy for this barrier it seems that indeed the low setting reduces the geometry quality used for the shadow most of the time you'll see no difference and you probably won't have noticed this either unless I pointed it out given that there is a small performance Improvement moving from high to medium with little to no perceptible quality change I would recommend the medium setting low does produce a quality difference but didn't seem to come with much of a performance gain so I wouldn't use that mode local Shadow quality does exactly what it says for Shadows casted by artificial light sources such as indoors red reducing this setting reduces the quality and resolution of these Shadows the high setting preserves the sharpest local Shadows medium is a clear reduction compared to high with a blurrier shadow presentation low is basically identical to medium then off completely turns off local Shadows which hurts the image quality the only major performance difference I spotted from this setting was turning it down from high to medium as there was not much of a difference between medium and off outside of a small Improvement to 1% lows in our test area I would strongly suggest not turning off local Shadows for those after the best visual quality I feel that the high setting is a clear enough upgrade to justify a 2% hit to Performance for those after more performance medium is a good choice as it still preserves local Shadows just at a reduced quality cascaded Shadows range impacts how far into the distance you'll see Dynamic Shadows casted from the Sun in this scene for example you'll notice that with the setting on High pretty much all of the NPCs and grass even far into the distance have Sun Shadows turning this down to medium removes Sun Shadows for distant NPCs but it preserves it for closer NPCs and then turning it to Off remove Shadows for distant and near NPCs even affecting some of the closer grass elements so the game does look flatter with this setting on low not a huge performance gain to be had here even though parts of our Benchmark run are outside where this setting would make a difference at best turning the setting to low would see a 1 to 2% gain which just isn't worth it I would recommend keeping this on high cascaded Shadows resolution affects the sharpness and Clarity of sun Shadows the high and medium settings are pretty similar but high does produce less shadow aliasing in some scenes so it is the least artifacted way to play the low setting though has clearly reduced Shadow resolution with lots of shimmering and aliasing across the presentation so I'd avoid that mode if possible for performance you'll only see a 1 to 2% gain moving from high to medium so for the best visual quality I'd stick with high Shadow resolution only using medium if you need more performance low performs pretty similar to medium for a much larger reduction to image quality so I wouldn't recommend it distant Shadows resolution is similar to C cascaded Shadows resolution but only affects Shadows further from the camera the impact of this setting can be hard to spot but I did find one area where the difference is visible considering it has little to no performance impact in intensive areas of the game I would use the high setting volumetric fog resolution is similar to this setting on other games in that it has a big impact on performance visually though the differences can be quite subtle when stationary there's not a huge difference between ultra high and medium with high settings being slightly more accurate however when dropping to low you'll notice a reduction to fog quality even when standing still with artifacts that I think are noticeable in motion the differences are a little more pronounced with ultra providing the ultimate clean experience High looking very slightly worse than Ultra medium being a step down and low producing many artifacts given these are fairly standard temporal artifacts from using lower volumetric fog quality it's possible you won't even notice this during normal gameplay as the amount of fog and its density is pretty much the same even on Lower quality settings when we look at the performance impact dropping volumetric fog from Ultra to High provides just a 1% performance Improvement but Ultra to medium is a significant 7% impact to average frame rates low is slightly more performant than medium this level of artifacting from medium fog is definitely more noticeable than using Ultra but I feel it doesn't ruin the experience to that significant of a degree and I would take the 7% performance gain it provides Ultra is definitely the best way to play for gamers with highend gpus but for everyone else I would optimize this down to medium and I'd avoid low even on lower and graphics cards volumetric Cloud quality affects the resolution of clouds it's pretty hard to tell the difference between ultra high and medium although I wouldn't recommend off as it just turns off clouds completely medium produces slightly lower resolution clouds than Ultra what's interesting about the performance of this setting is that during intensive areas of the game you just won't notice much of a performance impact that's because clouds are high up in the sky where you aren't often looking and the heaviest areas of the game also tend to have big tall skyscrapers that obscure the visibility of clouds yes you will notice a performance difference if you tilt up and you look at the sky or go out into the more sparse areas of the game but these areas also perform much better than the city areas of cyber punk in general given all of this i' would recommend using the medium quality setting it doesn't look that different from Ultra and it does give a performance boost in less intensive areas where clouds are more visible I upt to say an 8% Improvement just don't expect this setting to alleviate performance issues in cyber Punk's more intensive areas because it's unlikely clouds high up in the sky that you aren't looking at are the reason for low performance I didn't see much impact to Performance from the max Dynamic decal setting even when unloading tons of bullets into various areas so I'd leave this on Ultra screen space Reflections quality is by far the most intensive non-r Tred setting in the game simply put it affects the resolution and therefore Clarity of Reflections the higher you go the clearer the reflections moving from Ultra to high isn't a massive difference though it is noticeable in some areas medium is a step down with blurrier and less defined Reflections while low really cuts down on the resolution to essentially just provide the essence of a reflection off disables the feature entirely which given the amount of reflective surfaces in the game delivers a huge bloo image quality there's also the psycho setting One Step Above Ultra which provides an even higher reflection resolution but the gap between these modes is similar to the difference between high and Ultra so it's not a massive Improvement for gamers that want to enjoy optimized but still high quality visuals I think the medium setting here is the way to go as it provides a 20% performance Improvement for only a small hit to visuals that's certainly substantial I could also justify high as it looks close to ultra but with an 11% gain but I feel that most Gamers will prefer the extra performance on offer from medium low is a great choice if you need even more performance as the 26% performance gain over Ultra is massive given Reflections are still enabled though at a noticeably lower quality than medium turning off SSR gives a 10% gain over medium but drastically transforms the game's visuals the psycho setting also is completely pointless as it just destroys performance for only a minor quality gain definitely wouldn't recommend using it subsurface scattering quality is supposed to affect skin quality but honestly I couldn't find any visual difference it could be there it's just not very noticeable and performance is largely unchanged whether you use high or low so you may as well keep this on high ambient occlusion works in the same way as other games providing self shadowing for close together objects the difference between high medium and low is the strength of ambient occlusion with high settings providing greater shadowing and more depth the impact of this varies depending on the area but I do feel that low makes the game world look flatter than using high off disables the effect entirely which makes the game look very flat and underwhelming definitely would not recommend that setting as for performance ambient occlusion doesn't have a huge impact switching from high to low improved my frame rate in the most intensive area of Dogtown by just 2% it's only disabling the effect entirely that gives a large performance boost given that I feel the game looks noticeably flatter using low ambient occlusion I'd keep this setting on high only reducing to low if you need extra performance color Precision is supposed to reduce banding when set to high but I didn't really spot any noticeable difference to medium given that Medium is 1% faster on average you may as well use the medium setting mirror quality is not that important of a setting in cyberpunk because the most intensive areas will typically run worse than areas that have mirrors enabled for that reason you may as well just leave this on high as it has no impact during regular gameplay however if mirrors really destroy performance on your system each setting produces a step down in Mirror resolution I saw up to a 21% performance gain in mirrors switching from high to medium and 31% from Ultra to low so medium is a good midpoint here level of detail is supposed to affect geometry detail and draw distances but in cyberpunk I found the setting has no impact of visuals or performance bit weird but I am quite confident that even in areas with vast view distances the setting doesn't change anything so keep it on high crowd density affects the number of NPCs in busy areas and typically while GPU limited this setting has little to no impact on performance therefore if you have a high-end CPU and aren't finding yourself CPU constrained the best course of action is to set this too high so you enjoy a more densely packed Game World however crowd density is still reasonable on low so if you have a slower CPU and a struggling in these difficult to run areas of Dogtown turning the setting down to low is definitely viable and will improve performance somewhat next up we get to the r Trac effects R Trac Reflections in my opinion has the biggest impact on visual quality these reflections repl screen space Reflections and work in many more circumstances like when the object in the reflection is not on screen or when the reflective surface is glass and it needs to reflect what is behind you this significantly transforms the visuals of the game to make it look better and more accurate on top of this other Reflections where SSR would normally be applied are now enhanced with increased resolution and higher accuracy in many areas Reflections go from blurry to much clearer when RT Reflections are enabled the performance hit is quite large from using this setting so the optimized choice would be to not use Ray tracing RT Reflections relative to Ultra screen space Reflections caused a 24% performance hit on the RTX 470 a gap that's even larger on AMD gpus relative to medium SSR that we recommend for optimized gaming rate Trace Reflections runs 37% slower so this is very much a premium visual feature however it runs much better than psycho screen space Reflections again making that psycho setting pointless R Trace Sun Shadows are supposed to improve the accuracy of Shadows in the game but ends up just making the presentation look different to ultra Riz Shadows it doesn't necessarily make the game look noticeably better in my opinion often Riz Shadows are sharper if that's what you are after and in many areas r r Shadows look pretty close to the rasterized versions given that enabling this setting reduced performance by 14% I wouldn't recommend using it R race local Shadows is an interesting one in some areas I found that RT Shadows for artificial lights can make the game look worse like here what on Earth is happening there with the RT shadow in other areas it can provide significantly improved accuracy and even provide Shadows where previously there weren't any on average in our Benchmark pass we found a similar impact from RT local shadows as RT Sun Shadows but the visual impact is typically better from local Shadows running local and Sun Shadows together isn't that much more intensive than just running one of the settings but my preference here is local Shadows R TRC lighting affects Global illumination and ambient occlusion with each of the three modes adding additional accuracy this is a tricky setting to evaluate as a lot of the time rate Trace lighting makes the game look different but doesn't necessarily make it look better especially after you realize it's not that accurate compared to the path Trac mode in many scenes the impact of it lighting was obvious but simply affected what objects receive shadowing and Illumination in some scenes I found RT lighting to be clearly Superior and more accurate in others it just looked like an artist had gone through and changed the way the game looked as artists will do for all lighting Styles including rization the differences between RT Lighting on medium Ultra and psycho were also reasonably subtle and again mostly just changed the way the game looked without making it clearly look better personally this is a setting I would experiment with and only enable if you significantly prefer the way the rate Trace lighting looks compared to ultra level rasterization I find RT lighting looks slightly better in my opinion though I couldn't justify using a setting higher than Medium as for performance impact RT lighting has the biggest impact of the RT settings outside of path tracing a 36% impact using medium 41% using Ultra and 48% using psycho is quite hard to justify in my opinion if you only have so much performance to spare I would much prefer getting the visual impact of it reflections with a 37% hit relative to medium screen space Reflections compared to a 36% impact of RT lighting versus Ultra rization there's also the path traced mode which I'm not going to cover in depth here is obviously if you're looking to optimize performance you won't be using path tracing the the game does look significantly better than with either rasterized or normal R traced visuals but it will drop performance by 75% versus ultra settings as in you'll get one quarter of the performance you had previously which makes it virtually unplayable on most mid-range Hardware this setting is for those who have high in gpus that don't care about optimized performance and just want the best visual experience and fair enough if you've bought an RTX 490 go ahead and enjoy that path tracing don't worry about this guide the presets combine all of the impacts we saw from various individual settings relative to ultra rasterization high slightly reduces reflection and fog quality and cuts crowd density while maintaining all other effects medium drops texture quality to medium which noticeably Hurts The Clarity of these textures while also reducing Shadow quality somewhat it drops reflection quality down to medium for a noticeable impact and further reduces crowd density ambient occlusion quality is identical to ultra as is the use of contact Shadows so not every area gets cut down using this preset and ultimately I think it still looks good on medium settings low doesn't actually turn everything to the lower setting but it does noticeably cut texture quality an isotropy is impacted Shadows are lower quality fog is dropped to the lower setting that does increase artifacting ambient occlusion is reduced which makes the game world look flatter and most other settings are turned down but given the low setting does not disable Shadows Reflections clouds or ambient occlusion it still looks decent compared to minimum settings the steam deck preset is one of the best in the game even if you aren't actually playing it on a steam deck it uses is a mixture of high and medium settings while setting FSI to balanc but of course you can tweak upscaling to your liking the key benefits to this preset is that it cranks texture quality up to high maintains decent quality Reflections and fog and delivers medium quality shadows in many respects the steam deck preset visually is a better option than the medium preset as for the r traced presets these use ultra settings but begin to introduce rate racing RT low only enables local Shadows for a minimal visual impact only in some scenarios medium turns on local Shadows Sun shadows and Lighting on medium but leaves Reflections off not a huge fan of the optimization there for the medium RT preset then RT Ultra turns every RT feature on and sets lighting to ultra RT overdrive enables path tracing of course preset performance shows good scaling even without the use of upscaling Technologies High delivers a 14% performance improvement over Ultra and medium is nearly 40% faster while still looking excellent the steam deck preset is a little more intensive than medium but still offers a 34% gain over Ultra personally gaming on the ultra preset is a little pointless when high is so close visually but delivers 14% more performance while the steam deck preset is also a great choice if you want a decent FPS gain without messing around further just be sure to adjust those upscaling settings meanwhile the low preset is 77% faster than Ultra and honestly for a lot of Gamers with mid-range and lower tier Hardware low is still a great way to play the game as a lot of features remain enabled and the game still looks quite good as for the RT presets these are all quite taxing although RT low only sees a 16% performance impact as it only enables local Shadows once you get to medium you'll see a 40% cut to Performance Ultra will have performance at least and the overdrive setting will [ __ ] anything but highend Nvidia graphics cards we've tested here on an RTX 470 so note that these prets will scale even worse on AMD gpus where rate tracing could be very high to justify outside of Flagship rdna A3 gpus for optimized performance I wouldn't use any of these presets although rate tracing is likely going to be viable on higher end gpus where there is a lot more perform Headroom at the end of all of this here are our Hub optimized settings The Hub quality mode is aimed to be a version of ultra settings sacrificing screen space reflection quality and a little bit to volumetric fog to hit much higher frame rates relative to ultra pretty much everything else is maintained on the higher setting including Shadow quality ambient occlusion textures and level of detail The Hub performance mode is for those that need more performance and would typically choose the medium preset this mode slightly Cuts back on shadows and ambient occlusion and further reduces screen space Reflections but maintain contains high textures and crowd density which are cut when using the built-in medium and low presets lastly I have the rate tracing hierarchy of importance in cyber Punk rate tracing generally delivers a larger performance impact than you will receive in visual benefit meaning that for most Gamers after the best optimization you would disable rate tracing entirely however those with higher in gpus may want to dabble in raate tracing anyway in which case I would enable it with the following order of importance in my opinion Reflections is the setting you'll want to use if you use R tracing at all follow by local Shadows RT lighting set to medium is of lesser importance but could be worth using if you prefer the way it changes Lighting in the game I wouldn't bother with the RT lighting higher than medium or RT Sun Shadows path racing delivers a big visual Improvement at a huge cost to Performance so while the mode is impressive the mammoth Hardware requirements really restrict this to the highest end gpus hence why it's labeled a technology preview here are some examples of our optimized settings in action the Hub quality mode for the most part looks very similar to ultra especially when you aren't stopping to analyze Reflections cyberpunk scales very well and while the medium preset still looks great in my opinion using Hub quality instead is even better and really preserves the general highquality experience you should expect from this title Hub performance is only downgraded slightly from Hub quality and ends up delivering better image quality than the medium preset in my opinion due to its high level of texture quality and increased crowd density with that said Gamers with weaker CPUs will probably have to reduce crowd density to improve CPU performance with these sorts of optimization cyberpunk is nowhere near as demanding as it first appears when looking at Ultra preset benchmarks and here is the performance impact in our test area we found a 42% performance Improvement using Hub quality over the ultra preset which ended up delivering similar performance to the medium preset a great result in my opinion The Hub performance preset delivered 63% more performance than Ultra and a 15% gain on HUB quality so it ended up sitting between medium and low with Superior image quality this should take any GPU that normally runs cyber Punk at around 60 FPS using ult settings and transform it into an 85 Plus FPS experience those only getting around 40 FPS should now be hitting much closer to 60 FPS especially using Hub performance so there you have it cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty optimized settings with a focus on the new area of the game which itself is stunning from a visual design and art Direction perspective having now been worked on for several years after its release cyber Punk is in a better State than ever on PC and it continues to be one of the best looking games you can play right now it's also generally well optimized the 2.0 update is certainly far better than Star Wars Jedi Survivor or Starfield for example the best aspect to cyber Punk on PC is there's a wealth of quality settings that range anywhere from spectacular path tracing to high quality rasterization some people may feel they are missing out on the ray traced experience in cyberpunk if their Hardware can't handle it but honestly I don't feel that's the case even on medium and low settings this game holds up nicely it looks excellent all while delivering a solid level of performance just from preset scaling alone there's a 70% performance gain on the table for rasterization and that's without disabling key features like Reflections the only criticism of the game's visuals and experience that I have is that texture quality and draw distance could be improved especially as highend gpus these days feature 16 GB or more of vram and cyberpunk does little to fill that sort of vram buffer an ultra quality setting would be much appreciated especially for those with RTX 490s that will be enjoying the path tracing mode that transforms the game's lighting without transforming its level of detail anyway that's it for our cyberpunk optimization guide hopefully all of you guys that are coming back to cyber Punk or starting it for the first time appreciate this sort of analysis and as I said this has all being updated for the new Phantom Liberty expansion if you do appreciate our independent testing and Analysis like this then please do consider supporting us via our patreon or float plan accounts links to those are in the description below you get access to some cool benefits like our Discord community the live streams BTS videos plenty of good stuff there so thanks for watching and I'll catch you in the next [Music] [Music] one

Channel: Hardware Unboxed

Views: 419,862

Keywords: hardware unboxed

Id: B03_Aa5NwIY

Length: 27min 23sec (1643 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 26 2023