Cyberpunk 2077 can look really bad and underperforming on the PS4 and Xbox One consoles, but the PC version is another story. Activating NVIDIA DLSS helps to have a noticeably better performance, but the bad part is that this also substantially worsens the graphic quality, so in this article we are going to tell you what graphic settings you should change to improve the visual quality in Cyberpunk 2077 with low performance impact.
With NVIDIA DLSS enabled in the game, you can see a great improvement in performance, but you also notice that the visual quality drops a lot. Thus, when you are in moving scenes it is noticeable that the quality is quite questionable, but when you spend a couple of seconds in a static scene then it already begins to look as it should be. With the following graphic adjustments that we are going to list below, you will be able to alleviate this effect of DLSS a bit so that the game can be seen significantly better without affecting the performance too much.
How to improve the quality of Cyberpunk 2077 with graphics settings
If you have an NVIDIA RTX Series graphics card (and soon in theory a Radeon RX 6000 Series) you can enable Ray Tracing in the game, and among the graphics settings you will find four options that will help you improve the visual quality considerably.
- Ray Traced Reflections : Ray traced reflections are used on all surfaces and can trace ranges of up to several kilometers, allowing for realistic reflections at long viewing distances. They are present on opaque and transparent objects and surfaces to simulate the way light reflects off shiny and metallic surfaces by tracing a single bounce of reflection rays against the scene.
- Ambient Occlusion : Ray Traced Ambient Occlusion can be used with local lights to approximate local shadow effects where shadows are missing, greatly improving the quality of the ambient occlusion effect.
- Ray Traced Shadows : Directional shadows from sunlight and moonlight are present in the game, and depending on the strength of the light, scattering by clouds and other factors can generate more or less intense shadows.
- Ray Tracing Lighting – Captures glare from the sky as well as emissive lighting from various surfaces. When enabled, billboards and other surfaces will illuminate your surroundings with natural colored lighting, while the sun and moon will realistically illuminate the city.
Sharpen the scene with Profile Inspector
As we have said before, NVIDIA DLSS improves performance a lot in Cyberpunk but also reduces the graphic quality that we perceive, since the textures appear quite blurry in many cases and even in moving scenes there is a noticeable ghosting effect. This is because according to NVIDIA’s own DLSS 2.0 manual from GTC 2020, the image reconstruction technique is not designed to improve the resolution of textures.
For this reason NVIDIA recommends that developers modify the Mip Bias settings so that the resolution of the textures matches the native rendering resolution rather than the base that DLSS uses to reconstruct (for example, at 1080p when playing at resolution 4K). It seems that CD Projekt Red forgot to do it in Cyberpunk 2077 and it is the reason why we can see the blurry images.
Luckily, proposed solutions have already appeared on Reddit that can mitigate this to some extent: you have to set the Texture LOD Bias parameter to -3 through the NVIDIA Profile Inspector , which produces a significant improvement in the sharpness of the images, especially on the ground textures.
Although CD Projekt Red released a patch of no less than 9 GB for Cyberpunk 2077 on PC yesterday , it does not appear that they have managed to improve either the performance or the graphic quality for now and, in fact, have disabled the option to modify the file to change the memory used by the game that we showed you last week in an absurd way and without giving any explanation
Amelia Warner
Amelia Warner writes all the Latest Articles. She mostly covers Entertainment topics, but at times loves to write about movie reviews as well.
