How to Improve Cyberpunk 2077 Performance, Frame Rate (FPS)

by Sameed Khan · January 7, 2021

The hot fixes developer CD Projekt RED pushed following Cyberpunk 2077‘s disastrous release may have made the game somewhat more stable and performant, though the overall experience is still far from consistently smooth. This is assuming you are running it on mid-to-high-tier hardware. If your gaming PC is more than a couple years old, or sports an entry-level GPU, it’ll most likely struggle to hit a respectable frame rate even on the lowest graphics preset.

There are, thankfully, a few additional steps you can take to improve the game’s performance, if only by a hair.

Lower the Texture Quality

The first thing to note that the texture quality is independent of the aforementioned graphics presets. You can’t change the texture detail while in game. The option can be seen under the Quick Preset option if you access Graphics settings (Settings > Graphics) from the game’s start screen.

Turn on DLSS

If you have a GeForce 20 series or newer card and want to squeeze out as high a frame rate as possible, go right ahead and enable the DLSS option at the bottom of the game’s Graphics settings, under Resolution Scaling. Deep Learning Supersampling, as the name implies, renders the game at a lower resolution, then scales it up to a higher res, filling in the missing details using the magic of AI, freeing the GPU to output more frames every second, and with an unnoticeable drop in image quality to boot.

Turn on Dynamic FidelityFX CAS

If you don’t have a GPU that supports DLSS, you may opt to enable the Dynamic FidelityFX CAS option under Resolution Scaling. Doing so will allow the game to dynamically lower the rendering resolution under high load, sharpening each resulting frame to counter the resultant blurring.

The loss in detail is still quite a bit more noticeable compared to DLSS, but is arguably more flexible, with users able to specify a target frame rate for the game to maintain and the minimum resolution to drop to (down to a minimum of 50% of the base resolution) when rendering complex scenes.

Testing Dynamic FidelityFX CAS on the GTX 1060, setting the target FPS to 60 and minimum resolution to 75% improved the frame rate by 15-17 frames per second with slight blurring under high load.

Turn off Ray Tracing

This may sound like a bummer to those with GPUs capable of ray tracing, but this particular feature is by far the biggest frame rate hog. If you’re one to prioritize consistent FPS over lifelike reflections, this is the first compromise to make.

You’ll find the Ray Tracing toggle toward the bottom of the game’s Graphics settings.

Lower Crowd Density

Night City is one of the liveliest open worlds in recent memory, but that comes at a price. You might have noticed significant drops in frame rate around large NPC crowds. Good thing is, you can thin these crowds out if you so desire. You’ll find the Lower Crowd Density option under Settings > Gameplay.

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