Night City is a visual masterpiece, a neon-drenched concrete jungle that can bring even the mightiest PCs to their knees. Getting Cyberpunk 2077 to run smoothly without making it look like a potato is the real endgame. If you’re tired of stuttering during intense firefights or frame drops while cruising through Watson, you’ve come to the right place.
This guide is all about how to increase your FPS in Cyberpunk 2077, breaking down the performance-heavy settings and offering optimized tweaks so you can find that perfect balance between buttery-smooth gameplay and visual fidelity.
The Heart of Night City: REDengine 4
Before we start tweaking settings, it’s worth knowing what we’re working with. Cyberpunk 2077 was built on REDengine 4, the final version of CD Projekt Red’s own engine. This thing was designed to be a powerhouse, packing in features like hardware-accelerated ray tracing, global illumination, and all sorts of other fancy tech that makes the world feel alive.
It’s also the reason the game is so demanding. Interestingly, CDPR is moving to Unreal Engine 5 for future projects, making Cyberpunk 2077 the last showcase of this impressive, albeit performance-hungry, piece of tech.
Is My PC Good Enough for Cyberpunk 2077?
This is the million-dollar question, isn’t it? The official specs have been updated since launch, especially with the Phantom Liberty expansion shaking things up. Forget what you heard back in 2020. These are the numbers that matter now.
| Setting | Resolution | Target FPS | CPU | GPU | RAM | Storage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Minimum | 1080p | 30 | Core i7-6700 / Ryzen 5 1600 | GTX 1060 6GB / RX 580 8GB | 12GB | 70GB SSD |
| Recommended | 1080p | 60 | Core i7-12700 / Ryzen 7 7800X3D | RTX 2060 Super / RX 5700 XT | 16GB | 70GB SSD |
| Ultra | 4K | 60 | Core i9-12900 / Ryzen 9 7900X | RTX 3080 / RX 7900 XTX | 20GB | 70GB NVMe |
| RT Overdrive | 4K | 60 | Core i9-12900 / Ryzen 9 7900X | RTX 4080 | 24GB | 70GB NVMe |
As you can see, the requirements are no joke. An SSD is listed as mandatory now, and honestly, playing this game on a traditional hard drive is just asking for a bad time with textures constantly popping in.
The Best Performance Settings for Maximum FPS
Alright, let’s get our hands dirty. The goal here is to gain as much performance as possible with the least visual sacrifice. Some settings in Cyberpunk 2077 are absolute FPS killers.
The Most Demanding Settings to Tweak First
If you’re looking for a quick boost, these are the options to turn down immediately. These are the most performance-heavy settings in Cyberpunk 2077, and lowering them will give you the biggest gains.
- Screen Space Reflections Quality: This is, without a doubt, the single most demanding setting. Putting this on “Psycho” can tank your framerate by over 50%. Seriously. Dropping this to Low or Medium is the fastest way to reclaim a massive chunk of performance.
- Ray Tracing: Unless you’re running an RTX 3080 or better, just turn it off. It’s beautiful, yes, but the performance cost is astronomical, often cutting your FPS in half. And FPS is King. I’d better have stable 100 fps than 55-60 with ray tracing. I don’t care about ray tracing, so I just disable it, even though my RX 9070 is capable of running it 60 fps+.
- Volumetric Fog & Clouds: These add a lot of atmosphere, but they are incredibly taxing. Dropping both Volumetric Fog Resolution and Volumetric Cloud Quality to Low or Medium will net you a very noticeable FPS increase, and you probably won’t even miss the difference in a firefight.
- Crowd Density: This one hits your CPU more than your GPU. If you’re in a dense area like Japantown and your frames are dropping, lowering Crowd Density to Medium can really help smooth things out, especially on older CPUs.
- Last but not least: Disable your overlays. All of them. Especially the Steam overlay that is infamous for adding input lag and tanking your FPS. Unless you’re actively using it, turn it off.
For those who want to push things even further, my list of performance mods for Cyberpunk 2077 can help you squeeze out a few more frames with community-made optimizations.
Performance Mods For Cyberpunk 2077My Recommended Optimized Settings for a Mid-Range PC
After tons of testing, here are the settings I’ve found to offer the best balance of looks and speed. This is a great starting point; feel free to adjust based on your specific hardware.
| Setting | Recommended Value | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| Texture Quality | High (if 8GB+ VRAM) / Medium | High textures look great, but Medium is the safe bet for cards with less VRAM to avoid stuttering. |
| Screen Space Reflections | Medium | One of the biggest FPS killers. Medium offers a good visual return without destroying your performance. |
| Ambient Occlusion | Low | Provides a decent FPS boost with only a minor impact on shadow depth. |
| Volumetric Fog Resolution | Low | Another huge performance hog. The visual difference between Low and High is minimal during gameplay. |
| Volumetric Cloud Quality | Medium | A good middle ground. Setting this to Off gives a big FPS boost, but Medium keeps the sky from looking too flat. |
| Cascaded Shadow Range | Medium | Affects how far away detailed shadows are rendered. Medium is a good compromise for CPU performance. |
| Local Shadow Quality | High | This has a smaller performance impact than other shadow settings and keeps nearby shadows looking sharp. |
| Level of Detail (LOD) | High | A solid setting that keeps the world looking detailed without a major performance cost on most systems. |
| Crowd Density | Medium | This eases the load on your CPU in busy city areas, helping to reduce sudden frame drops. |
| DLSS / FSR | Balanced / Quality | The sweet spot. “Balanced” offers a great mix of performance and image clarity for most resolutions. |
| Chromatic Aberration | Off | A stylistic choice that mimics a camera lens. Turning it off provides a cleaner, sharper image. |
| Film Grain | Off | Another stylistic filter. Disabling it results in a less noisy and clearer picture. |
| Motion Blur | Off | Turning this off makes fast movements and combat feel much clearer and more responsive. |
Optimized Settings for Low-End PCs
If you’re running on older hardware, don’t despair. You can still get a playable experience out of Night City with some aggressive tweaking. The target here is a stable 60 FPS at 1080p.
| Setting | Recommended for Low-End |
|---|---|
| Resolution | 1920 x 1080 (or your max) |
| Ray Tracing | Off |
| Texture Quality | Medium (or Low if VRAM is <6GB) |
| Upscaling (DLSS/FSR) | Balanced / Performance |
| Volumetric Cloud Quality | Off |
| Volumetric Fog Resolution | Low |
| Screen Space Reflections | Off |
| Ambient Occlusion | Medium |
| Color Precision | Medium |
| Contact Shadows | On |
| All other Shadow settings | Low / Medium |
| LOD | medium |
DLSS and FSR: Performance vs. Quality Explained
Upscaling tech is basically magic. Both NVIDIA’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR render the game at a lower internal resolution and then use clever algorithms to upscale it to your target resolution. This gives a massive performance boost.
- Quality Mode: Offers the best image quality, almost indistinguishable from native resolution, but with a smaller FPS gain.
- Balanced Mode: The sweet spot for most people. A good mix of visual clarity and a significant performance uplift.
- Performance / Ultra Performance: Provides the biggest FPS jump but can make the image look a bit soft or blurry, especially at 1080p. Best used for 4K gaming.
So, which Cyberpunk 2077 DLSS performance vs quality setting should you use? For most systems, I’d recommend starting with DLSS or FSR set to Balanced. The image quality is still fantastic, and the FPS boost is too good to ignore.
Advanced Performance Tweaks
If you’ve optimized your in-game settings and still want more, there are a few things you can do outside the game.
- Enable Resizable BAR: If your motherboard and GPU support it, enable this in your BIOS. It can give a nice little performance bum or Smart Access Memory if you are team AMD (like myself)
- Windows Game Mode & GPU Scheduling: Make sure Game Mode is off (don’t like it) and Hardware-Accelerated GPU Scheduling is on in your Windows settings.
- High-Performance Power Profile: Set your Windows power plan to High Performance to ensure your CPU is running at full clock speed.
- Set High Priority: Open Task Manager, go to the Details tab, find Cyberpunk2077.exe, right-click it, and set the priority to High. This tells Windows to give the game more CPU resources.
Sometimes, you might want to use the in-game console to test specific settings without digging through menus or simply cheating. I have a whole guide on console commands for Cyberpunk 2077 that can make testing and tweaking a lot easier.
Console Commands For Cyberpunk 2077For the Hardcore Tweakers: NVIDIA Control Panel Settings
Alright, a word of warning before we dive in here. This next part is for those who really like to get under the hood of their rig. If you don’t know what these settings do, I honestly recommend you leave most of them alone. You can easily create new problems or make the game less stable. Chasing a few extra frames isn’t worth it if the game crashes every ten minutes.
Open up GeForce Experience and turn off the “In-Game Overlay.” It’s a known resource hog and can cause stuttering or input lag. Unless you’re constantly using it to record, just disable it. That’s it.
The Only Two NVIDIA Settings Most People Should Change
Again, messing with settings is for advanced users, don’t even try copy-pasting random recommendations from reddit or steam. For everyone else, there are only two settings here that provide a clear, safe, and noticeable benefit.
| Setting | Recommended Value | Why You Should Change It |
|---|---|---|
| Power Management Mode | Prefer Max Performance | By default, your GPU tries to save power by lowering its clock speeds when it thinks it can get away with it. This setting tells your GPU to stay at its full performance clock speed while the game is running, which can reduce stuttering and improve stability. |
| Max Frame Rate | 3-4 FPS below your monitor’s max refresh rate | This sounds counterintuitive, but it’s a huge trick for smoother gameplay. Capping your FPS just below your monitor’s limit (e.g., 141 FPS on a 144Hz monitor) keeps technologies like G-Sync or FreeSync in their optimal range and prevents the input lag spikes that occur when your GPU hits 100% usage. The result is a much more consistent and responsive feel. |
These two tweaks alone can make a real difference in how smooth the game feels, without you having to touch any of the more complex options. Remember, your biggest FPS gains will always come from the in-game settings we’ve already covered.
For My Fellow AMD Users (Team Red Edition)
Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about my chooms running AMD hardware. While many of the settings in the Adrenalin software are best left to tweakers, there are a couple of high-impact changes you should absolutely make.
First, within the AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition, go to the Performance tab and then to Tracking. Turn off all the metric logging options here. While it’s cool to see your stats, this in-game overlay is a known resource hog and can introduce stuttering. Unless you’re actively diagnosing a problem, it’s just performance left on the table. Disable it.
The Real Game-Changer: Smart Access Memory (SAM)
This is the big one. If your system supports it (you’ll need a Ryzen 3000/5000 series or newer CPU and an RX 5000/6000 series or newer GPU), you need to make sure Smart Access Memory (SAM) is enabled. In some motherboards, this might be called “Re-Size BAR Support” or something similar in the BIOS.
What it does: Normally, your CPU can only access a tiny fraction of your GPU’s video memory (VRAM) at a time. It’s an old limitation from a bygone era of hardware. SAM (or Re-Size BAR) breaks down that wall, allowing your CPU to access the entire VRAM at once.
Why it matters in Cyberpunk 2077: Night City is a massive, texture-heavy environment. Enabling SAM gives your CPU a much wider pipeline to shovel those assets to your GPU, which can lead to a significant performance uplift—we’re talking a potential 5-15% FPS boost in some scenarios. It’s essentially free performance that you’re leaving on the table if it’s turned off.
What’s the deal with Patch 2.3 and performance?
The patch that I gave with one hand and took with the other. Patch 2.3 was a big one, adding cool stuff like AutoDrive and more vehicle customization. But it also swapped out AMD’s FSR 3.0 for the newer FSR 3.1, and the results have been… mixed. Here’s the breakdown:
- FSR 3.1 Performance Drop: Benchmarks show that FSR 3.1 can actually result in a small but noticeable FPS drop. We’re talking 3-5 frames on average in balanced mode compared to the old version.
- Stuttering Issues: There are also some pretty nasty stuttering and bigger FPS drops after the update, particularly in busy areas.
- Potential Fixes: If you’re seeing this, a couple of things might help. First, make sure your graphics drivers are up to date. Second, try setting the FSR frame generation setting to “adaptive” instead of the default. It seems to help smooth things.
The core advice in this guide still stands, but you’ll want to pay extra attention to how FSR 3.1 behaves on your system.
Forging Your Own Path in Night City
At the end of the day, finding the best performance settings for Cyberpunk 2077 is a personal journey. What works for my rig might not be perfect for yours. Use this guide as a starting point. Tweak one setting at a time, see how it affects your framerate, and decide if the visual trade-off is worth it. The goal is to create an experience that you enjoy, whether that’s chasing the highest possible FPS or soaking in every last ray-traced reflection.
If you enjoy this kind of detailed breakdown, you might want to check out my main collection of Cyberpunk content. I’m building a small hub here for players who appreciate getting into the nuts and bolts of how games work. Happy tweaking, choom.
Performance Questions, Answered
Honestly, you’re gonna want to spring for the Ultimate tier. People on the standard “Performance” tier are constantly reporting issues with textures taking forever to load and choppy FPS. It seems the CPUs on those servers just can’t keep up with Night City. If you want a smooth experience, especially if you want to crank up the settings and maybe even dabble in path tracing, the Ultimate tier with its RTX 3080 and 40-series cards is pretty much mandatory. The basic tier just feels like a gamble, especially during peak hours.
Welcome to the joys of post-patch life. This is a super common complaint after a big update. Sometimes a new patch just doesn’t play nice with existing drivers or server configurations. The usual suspects are NVIDIA drivers needing an update, or a server-side issue with GeForce Now that you just have to wait out. Performance getting worse after an update is, sadly, a known thing. The best you can do is make sure your drivers are current and maybe try toggling settings like DLSS Auto or Frame Generation off and on again.
The golden rule is this: turn off Ray Tracing. That’s your biggest FPS gain right there. After that, knock down Volumetric Fog and Volumetric Cloud Quality—they’re pretty but they eat frames for breakfast. For upscaling, DLSS Balanced is the sweet spot; “Performance” mode can get a bit blurry. And for the love of all that is chrome, turn off Motion Blur, Film Grain, and Chromatic Aberration. Your eyes will thank you, and you’ll get a few frames back.
It’s the classic trade-off. Performance mode is what most players stick with. It gets you that smooth 60 FPS gameplay that feels responsive and fluid, which is what you want in a fast-paced game like this. The downside is you lose some of the fancy graphical bells and whistles, especially ray-traced reflections. Quality mode makes everything look prettier and more detailed, but your framerate can dip into the 40s or 50s, especially on a PS5 or Series X. For pure gameplay, Performance mode is the clear winner.
This is the big one. If you’re rocking a mid-to-high-end RTX 20-series or 30-series card paired with a decent Ryzen 5 or Intel i7, you should be able to hit a stable 60 FPS at 1080p with a mix of medium and high settings. If you’re trying to push Ultra settings or turn on ray tracing, you’re going to need something beefier. And I can’t stress this enough: you absolutely need to install this game on an SSD. Trying to run it on a traditional hard drive is just asking for a world of stuttering and texture pop-in.
Start with the biggest FPS hogs. Lower your Shadows and Screen Space Reflections quality first. Turn off Ray Tracing completely. Use DLSS or FSR set to “Balanced” or “Quality.” In the gameplay settings, turn down Crowd Density—this will give your CPU a break in busy city areas. And, as always, close any unnecessary apps running in the background. Your browser with 50 tabs open is not doing your framerate any favors.
This usually happens for two reasons: your CPU can’t keep up (a CPU bottleneck) or the game can’t load textures fast enough from your drive. The most common places for this are dense city centers like Japantown or during intense combat with lots of explosions. The fixes are the usual suspects: update your graphics drivers, verify the integrity of your game files through Steam, and make sure the game is on an SSD. While patches have made the game much more stable, some stuttering, especially on cloud gaming platforms, can still be an issue.
For most people, no, it’s not. Ray Tracing looks incredible, there’s no denying that. The realistic lighting and reflections are genuinely impressive. But it will absolutely murder your framerate, often cutting it by 50% or more. You really need an RTX 3080 or better to even consider using it without turning the game into a slideshow. My advice? Turn it off for regular gameplay and only switch it on when you want to take some epic screenshots. Path Tracing (RT Overdrive) is even more demanding and is really only for those with top-of-the-line 40-series cards.
Yes, absolutely.There are several mods on sites like Nexus Mods specifically designed to improve performance. Some optimize the game’s engine settings, while others, more recently, have found ways to improve Path Tracing performance by up to 40% without a noticeable drop in visual quality. If you’re on PC, these are definitely worth checking out.
You’re going to have to make some sacrifices. The goal is a playable, stable framerate, not a visual showcase. Stick to Low or Medium settings across the board. Ray Tracing should be off, no exceptions. Use FSR or DLSS set to “Performance” or even “Ultra Performance.” Be aggressive about turning down shadows and volumetric effects.
