Cyberpunk 2077 — best graphics settings (2026)

Typical impact 0-5% · 4% fps cost

In Cyberpunk 2077, we recommend Texture Quality at High (4% fps cost).

Controls the maximum mipmap resolution loaded for surface textures. Higher levels stream larger texture maps (2K/4K) from disk into VRAM via the texture streaming pool. The GPU samples these during fragment shading using the currently bound sampler state. The FPS cost is minimal when VRAM is sufficient because texture fetch latency is hidden by the cache hierarchy, but exceeding VRAM capacity triggers page-faulting and hitching as textures are swapped between system RAM and VRAM.

In Cyberpunk 2077: Controls mipmap resolution streamed into the VRAM pool. High textures sharpen Night City's signage, clothing, and weapon detail with almost no compute cost, but VRAM-constrained cards (6GB at 1080p) will hitch and stream-pop when paired with RT. Drop to Medium only if you exceed your VRAM budget; otherwise keep High for the near-free fidelity.

Typical impact 8-25% · 6% fps cost

In Cyberpunk 2077, we recommend Shadow Quality at Medium (6% fps cost).

Controls shadow map resolution, filtering method, and cascade count for dynamic shadows. The engine renders the scene from each light source perspective into depth-only shadow map textures. Higher settings increase shadow map resolution (1024 to 4096 texels), add more cascaded shadow map splits for the directional light (improving near-field resolution), and enable softer PCF or PCSS filtering which requires more depth comparison samples per pixel during the lighting pass.

In Cyberpunk 2077: Sets cascaded shadow map resolution and filtering for the sun and local lights. High sharpens shadow edges on buildings and characters, but Night City's countless dynamic light sources make this costlier than typical. Medium is a strong compromise, saving roughly 5-10% with little perceptible softening, especially once RT shadows or path tracing are doing the heavy lifting.

Typical impact 20-50% · no measurable cost

In Cyberpunk 2077, the recommended preset leaves Ray Tracing off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

Enables hardware-accelerated ray tracing via DXR or Vulkan RT extensions, dispatching rays from the GPU RT cores through a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) acceleration structure built over scene geometry. Depending on the implementation, RT may cover reflections (tracing reflection rays from glossy surfaces), shadows (tracing shadow rays toward light sources for pixel-perfect hard/soft shadows), ambient occlusion (short-range visibility rays), and global illumination (multi-bounce path tracing). Each feature adds its own ray budget — a single pixel might dispatch 1-8 rays. BVH traversal and ray-triangle intersection testing occur on dedicated RT hardware, but shading the hit points runs on standard compute units.

In Cyberpunk 2077: REDengine 4 supports RT reflections, RT shadows, RT AO, RT GI, and full Path Tracing (Overdrive). Path Tracing replaces ALL rasterized lighting — 50-70% FPS hit even on RTX 5090. Requires DLSS.

Typical impact 3-20% · 8% fps cost

In Cyberpunk 2077, we recommend Reflection Quality at High (8% fps cost).

Controls the method and fidelity of surface reflections. Low settings use pre-baked cubemap probes — a single texture lookup per pixel. Medium enables screen-space reflections (SSR) that ray-march through the depth buffer to find reflected geometry. High uses higher-resolution SSR with more march steps. Ultra may enable planar reflections (re-rendering the scene from a mirrored viewpoint) or RT reflections (hardware-accelerated rays). The cost escalation from cubemaps to SSR to RT is dramatic — cubemaps are nearly free, SSR costs 3-8%, and RT reflections cost 15-25%.

In Cyberpunk 2077: Governs the rasterized SSR fallback fidelity used outside RT reflections. Psycho enables multi-bounce traces that hammer fill rate in Night City's wet, mirror-like streets — often the heaviest non-RT setting. Dropping from Psycho to Medium recovers 10-15% with little visible difference unless you're staring at puddles. Irrelevant if RT reflections are enabled.

Typical impact 3-12% · 4% fps cost

In Cyberpunk 2077, we recommend Ambient Occlusion at Medium (4% fps cost).

Computes soft shadowing in crevices and where surfaces meet by estimating how much ambient light is occluded at each pixel. SSAO samples the depth buffer in a hemisphere around each pixel, testing for nearby occluders. HBAO+ uses ray-marching along the depth buffer horizon. GTAO uses a multi-directional horizon search with cosine-weighted integration for physically correct results. Each method runs as a fullscreen compute or pixel shader pass — higher quality modes increase sample count from 4 (SSAO) to 32+ (GTAO Ultra), directly scaling the per-pixel ALU cost.

In Cyberpunk 2077: Adds contact shadowing in crevices and where geometry meets surfaces using a screen-space pass. High increases sample count for cleaner occlusion around props and characters, but the gain over Medium is subtle in motion. Medium costs only a few percent; disable entirely if you run RT AO or path tracing, which supersede it.

Typical impact 5-18% · 6% fps cost

In Cyberpunk 2077, we recommend Volumetric Fog at Medium (6% fps cost).

Renders physically-based 3D fog that interacts with lighting, shadows, and participating media density. The engine allocates a 3D froxel (frustum-voxel) volume texture — typically 160x90x64 or higher — and ray-marches through it from each pixel, accumulating scattered light and extinction at each step. Each froxel samples the shadow map to determine direct illumination, applies the Henyey-Greenstein phase function for anisotropic scattering, and accumulates density from noise textures or analytical fog volumes. The cost is substantial because every visible pixel requires a full volumetric integration.

In Cyberpunk 2077: Night City has dense atmospheric fog. Psycho volumetric fog calculates per-pixel ray marching — visible in neon-lit street scenes. 10-15% FPS impact.

Typical impact 5-15% · 10% fps cost

In Cyberpunk 2077, we recommend Screen Space Reflections at High (10% fps cost).

Computes reflections by ray-marching through the depth buffer in screen space. For each reflective pixel, a reflection ray is traced using hierarchical Z-buffer tracing (Hi-Z) — stepping through mip levels of the depth buffer to quickly find intersections. Higher settings increase the maximum ray march steps (16 to 128), enable multi-bounce SSR (tracing a second reflection from the hit point), and use higher-resolution tracing. The fundamental limitation is that SSR can only reflect what is visible on screen — off-screen geometry produces fallback cubemap reflections.

In Cyberpunk 2077: The most taxing non-RT setting in Cyberpunk. Psycho SSR uses multi-bounce tracing. Dropping to Medium saves 10-15% FPS.

Typical impact 3-12% · 3% fps cost

In Cyberpunk 2077, we recommend Level of Detail (LOD) at Medium (3% fps cost).

Governs the distance thresholds at which objects transition between LOD tiers. The engine uses screen-space projected size or distance-based heuristics to swap between high-poly and simplified meshes. Higher settings push these transition distances further, keeping detailed geometry on screen longer. This increases total triangle count, draw calls, and vertex buffer memory. In UE5 titles using Nanite, this controls the aggressiveness of the virtual geometry streaming system.

In Cyberpunk 2077: Controls LOD transition distances for Night City's buildings, props and clutter. High keeps detailed geometry on screen longer, reducing pop-in across the skyline at the cost of more draw calls and vertex throughput. The difference between High and Medium is modest in dense urban scenes; Medium can ease CPU-bound moments without obvious degradation.

Typical impact 8-20% · 8% fps cost

In Cyberpunk 2077, we recommend Crowd Density at Medium (8% fps cost).

Controls the maximum number of NPC entities spawned in populated areas. Each NPC requires CPU-side AI evaluation (navigation mesh queries, behavior tree ticks, perception checks), skeletal animation blending (bone matrix computation), collision detection, and GPU-side skeletal mesh rendering with skinning transforms. The primary bottleneck is CPU-side — animation blending and AI ticking for 100+ simultaneous NPCs can saturate multiple CPU cores.

In Cyberpunk 2077: CPU-bound setting controlling NPC population in Night City. High creates immersive streets but can tank FPS in Watson and City Center to 40-50 FPS even on high-end CPUs.

Typical impact -30-80% · no measurable cost

In Cyberpunk 2077, the recommended preset leaves NVIDIA DLSS off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

Deep Learning Super Sampling — NVIDIA's AI-based temporal upscaling that runs on dedicated Tensor Core hardware. The engine renders at a lower internal resolution and feeds the reduced-resolution frame, motion vectors, and depth buffer to a neural network that reconstructs a high-resolution output. DLSS 3+ adds optical flow-based frame generation on Ada/Blackwell architectures. The FPS gain comes from rendering fewer pixels — Quality mode renders ~67% of native pixels, Performance ~50%, Ultra Performance ~33%.

In Cyberpunk 2077: NVIDIA's Tensor-core upscaler and arguably the most important toggle in the game. Quality renders at ~67% and is visually near-native, delivering a large uplift. On RTX 40/50, pair with Frame Generation and Ray Reconstruction — the latter notably improves path-traced image stability. Quality or Balanced is mandatory for any RT-heavy or Overdrive configuration.

Typical impact -25-70% · no measurable cost

In Cyberpunk 2077, the recommended preset leaves AMD FSR off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

FidelityFX Super Resolution — AMD's upscaling technology available on all GPUs. FSR 2.0+ uses temporal accumulation similar to TAA — it combines multiple jittered lower-resolution frames using motion vectors and a depth buffer to reconstruct a higher-resolution output via a multi-pass compute shader pipeline. The pipeline includes depth clip detection, motion vector dilation, luminance instability detection, and a reconstruction pass with Lanczos-based resampling. Unlike DLSS, FSR runs on standard compute units rather than dedicated AI hardware, working vendor-agnostically.

In Cyberpunk 2077: AMD's vendor-agnostic temporal upscaler for non-RTX or older hardware. FSR 2/3 Quality reconstructs from ~67% resolution with a sizeable FPS gain, though it shows more shimmer on Night City's fine signage and fences than DLSS. FSR 3 Frame Generation works across vendors. Use Quality or Balanced; lower presets introduce visible artifacts in dense scenes.

Typical impact 1-5% · 2% fps cost

In Cyberpunk 2077, we recommend Motion Blur at High (2% fps cost).

Applies directional blur to moving objects based on per-pixel motion vectors. The engine writes a motion vector buffer during the G-buffer pass — each pixel stores a 2D velocity derived from the difference between current and previous frame positions. The post-process shader samples the color buffer along each pixel's motion vector, averaging multiple taps to produce directional streaking. The cost is a single fullscreen pass with 8-16 dependent texture fetches per pixel. Many competitive players disable this for image clarity.

In Cyberpunk 2077: Per-object and camera blur driven by the motion vector buffer. Cost is negligible, so this is purely aesthetic. Many players disable it for sharper clarity during driving and combat in Night City, while others enjoy the cinematic smear. No meaningful FPS reason to leave it on or off.

Typical impact 0-1% · no measurable cost

In Cyberpunk 2077, we recommend Chromatic Aberration at On (no measurable cost).

Simulates the lens imperfection where different wavelengths of light focus at slightly different points, producing color fringing at screen edges. The shader samples the color buffer three times per pixel — once each for red, green, and blue channels — with slightly offset UV coordinates that increase toward the screen periphery. The cost is trivial: one fullscreen pass with 3 texture fetches per pixel. Purely an aesthetic choice with virtually zero performance impact.

In Cyberpunk 2077: Adds RGB color fringing toward the screen edges to mimic lens imperfection. Cost is effectively zero — it's a single offset-sampled pass. Purely a stylistic choice; some find it enhances the gritty cyberpunk aesthetic while others disable it for cleaner edges. No performance consideration either way.

Typical impact 0-1% · no measurable cost

In Cyberpunk 2077, we recommend Film Grain at On (no measurable cost).

Overlays a procedural noise pattern on the final image to simulate analog film grain. The shader generates noise either from a tiling noise texture or procedurally using a hash function seeded with screen position and frame number. The noise is modulated by luminance and blended into the final color. The entire computation is a single texture fetch or ALU operation per pixel in the final composite pass — effectively zero cost.

In Cyberpunk 2077: Overlays procedural noise on the final image for a filmic look. Performance cost is unmeasurable. Disabling it sharpens perceived detail, particularly in dark interiors where grain is most visible; keeping it on suits the noir aesthetic. Entirely a preference toggle with no FPS implication.

Typical impact 2-8% · 1% fps cost

In Cyberpunk 2077, we recommend Depth of Field at On (1% fps cost).

Simulates camera lens focus by blurring pixels based on their distance from a focal plane. The depth buffer is sampled to determine each pixel's circle of confusion (CoC). A Gaussian or bokeh blur is applied with kernel size proportional to CoC. Higher quality modes use physically-based hexagonal or circular bokeh shapes via a gather pass. Cinematic mode may use separate near-field and far-field blur with smooth transitions. The cost scales with maximum CoC radius — large blur kernels require 32+ texture taps per pixel.

In Cyberpunk 2077: Blurs out-of-focus areas based on circle-of-confusion, most noticeable in dialogue scenes and photo mode. The bokeh gather pass costs a few percent during cutscenes but little during gameplay since gameplay DoF is subtle. Disable for crisper backgrounds; keep on for cinematic framing. Low overall impact.

Typical impact 2-15% · 3% fps cost

In Cyberpunk 2077, we recommend Anti-Aliasing at TAA (3% fps cost).

Smooths jagged edges (aliasing) on geometric boundaries. FXAA is a single-pass edge-detection blur — cheap but softens the image. TAA accumulates multiple frames using motion vectors, sampling sub-pixel jitter offsets to reconstruct smoother edges — moderate cost with potential ghosting. SMAA uses pattern-matching edge detection with a more intelligent blend. MSAA runs the rasterizer at 2x/4x the sample count, evaluating coverage for each triangle edge — expensive because it multiplies ROP work and render target memory, but produces sharp geometry edges without blur.

In Cyberpunk 2077: REDengine 4 relies on TAA, accumulating jittered frames via motion vectors to resolve edges. It's effectively mandatory — disabling it produces severe shimmer on Night City's fine geometry. TAA can look soft, so pair with the sharpening slider, or better, let DLSS/FSR handle anti-aliasing, as their reconstruction supersedes TAA entirely.