Cyberpunk 2077 is finally here. After years of waiting, one of the most anticipated games ever (in my book, anyway) has arrived. With the game now in its final form and ready for play, naturally, we want to run benchmarks to see how the game actually performs on a variety of hardware. We're doing that now, as you read this article, and we're also testing a variety of GPUs with different settings. We'll be continuously updating this article with test results and our observations as we test, and we're also taking requests from readers about which GPUs to test next, which you can vote on here.

With the long wait out of the way, we can finally put some actual numbers to the official Cyberpunk 2077 system requirements . The minimum GPU listed is a GTX 780, with GTX 1060 6GB recommended for 1080p high, RTX 2060 for 1440p ultra, and an RTX 2080 Super for 4K ultra. Then there's the ray tracing additions, with the RTX 2060 listed as the minimum for 1080p and RT medium, 3070 for 1440p and RT ultra, and 3080 for 4K RT ultra. Developer CD Projekt Red never stated what sort of performance players should expect from that hardware, but it looks like 30-40 fps for the lower end GPUs, and typically less than 60 fps even at the high end.

We posted some initial impressions of Cyberpunk 2077 earlier this week, but that was with pre-release code that was not yet fully optimized, plus it contained anti-piracy software Denuvo. However, based on our updated benchmarks, performance hasn't improved much with the release code and updated drivers. We're typically seeing about a 5 percent increase in performance, at best. If you're after smooth 60 fps performance, you're going to need to aim quite a bit higher than the suggested hardware.

We can say that the game is very playable at 30-60 fps on PC. Gunfights can be a bit more difficult if you're at the lower end of that range, but if you've played another shooter at 30-60 fps, Cyberpunk 2077 shouldn't pose any problems. It's not a fast-paced shooter by any stretch, and there are often other alternatives to shooting. Still, going from 30-40 fps up to 60+ fps makes for a much nicer experience overall.

Cyberpunk 2077 Performance Test Setup

We're playing the game with our standard GPU testbed as usual (specs to the right), which is very much over-spec in terms of what Cyberpunk 2077 requires. We've got twice the memory and twice the CPU cores, more or less, with a growing collection of GPUs that we'll be testing.

We'll also look at some CPU scaling tests, eventually, but with the preview code, we disabled half of the CPU cores on our Core i9-9900K to simulate a Core i7-7700K. It's technically clocked a bit higher and has more L3 cache, and we only tested with the RTX 3090. The extra cores boosted performance at lower resolutions by up to 25 percent, and more importantly, managed to consistently stay above 60 fps (provided the GPU was up to snuff). If you have an older CPU, particularly a 4-core/4-thread CPU like the 7th Gen and earlier Core i5 chips, you should set your expectations accordingly.

Currently, owners of AMD's new RX 6800 series graphics cards are locked out of ray tracing, but support will come post-launch. The preview version of the game initially let us try to enable ray tracing on AMD's cards, but enabling RT reflections caused an immediate crash. The other RT effects didn't necessarily work properly, either. Hopefully this gets addressed quickly post-launch.

Cyberpunk 2077 Settings Overview

There are approximately 24 different graphics settings you can tweak and tune in Cyberpunk 2077 , which is a lot. However, we're seeing relatively limited scaling in going from minimum to maximum quality. Resolution and resolution scaling have the biggest effect on performance, and beyond that, only a handful of settings seem to matter.

If you're hoping to improve framerates without resorting to the low or medium presets, your best bet is to start with dropping the Screen Space Reflections Quality to medium or even off. Based on our testing, that will improve performance by 10-15 percent. Volumetric Fog Resolution has the next biggest impact on performance, and dropping to low should add another 10-15 percent to your fps.

Beyond those two settings, finding ways to boost performance becomes a bit more difficult. All of the shadows-related settings combined ( Local Shadow Mesh and Quality , Cascaded Shadows Resolution and Range , Distant Shadows Resolution , and Ambient Occlusion ) are only good for another 10-15 percent. And if you drop everything else to minimum (stuff like Film Grain, Depth of Field, Motion Blur, Anisotropy, and Level of Detail), you only get about another 10 percent.

If you want to go the other way, turning on all the ray tracing extras via the RT Ultra preset , with DLSS turned off, cut performance in half — actually a bit more than half, unless you're running at 1080p on an RTX 3080 or 3090. Are all the RT effects worth the performance hit? We'd say so, provided you have a high-end RTX GPU, but you can certainly enjoy Cyberpunk 2077 without them.

The good news is that DLSS can recover a decent amount of performance if you have an RTX card (and you can use it without ray tracing if you want). DLSS Quality mode is good for around 40-60 percent more performance, and DLSS Balanced mode nearly doubled our performance at 1440p using the RT Ultra preset. DLSS Performance mode is mostly for 4K (or higher) resolutions and can basically double your fps compared to native.

For non-RTX GPU owners, the game's release version also has new FidelityFX CAS options for resolution scaling. The dynamic mode can adjust the scaling on the fly to try to hit your target framerate, while static scaling applies a set scaling factor. If you run at 4K with a static 50 percent scaling, the game renders at 1080p and uses FidelityFX to upscale the result, and then the UI elements are rendered at 4K. It's actually not a bad way to do things, though DLSS does look better overall.

Cyberpunk 2077 GPU Benchmarks ... Updating Live

So how does Cyberpunk 2077 run? Depending on your hardware and expectations, it either runs surprisingly well, or it runs like a turtle climbing up a steep hill. Maxed out quality on an RTX 20-series card, at 4K, without DLSS? That's the turtle. We'll get to the image quality comparisons below to show how the game looks, but one thing to keep in mind is that Night City is very impressive to look at and run or drive around in.

There's a full day/night cycle; you can start at one end of the city and run or drive through the whole maze without ever encountering a loading screen. Fast travel does cause a loading screen, of course, but that's because you effectively teleport to a new location, and there's no opportunity to dynamically load elements as you travel. Turn on all the ray tracing effects, and Night City looks even more impressive, with reflective surfaces and (relatively) accurate lighting and shadows.

As you'd expect, maxing out the settings requires a pretty decent rig, particularly on the GPU side of things. At 1080p with Nvidia's DLSS Quality mode enabled, the GeForce RTX 3080 cruises along at 80 fps. An RTX 2060, though? It probably won't hit 60 fps even with DLSS Performance mode. (We'll verify that soon enough.) But enough talk, let's hit the benchmarks.

Again, we're updating these charts "live," and you can vote for the next GPU we should test . (Obviously, you don't need to vote for a card we've already tested, and you can use the "Other" option if you want something else that's not listed.) Here's how things stand so far.

If you saw our performance preview and were hoping things would radically improve, we've got bad news: Cyberpunk 2077 is every bit as demanding as we showed before. At the medium preset, the GTX 1660 Super just barely manages 60 fps, and that's a big step up from the minimum GTX 780 GPU listed in the official system requirements.

At 1440p, not even the RX 5700 XT can hit 60 fps, though the RX 6900 XT and the RX 3080/3090 barely drop from their 1080p results, indicating we're CPU limited to around 105-110 fps at the medium preset. Those three GPUs also break 60 fps at 4K medium, which pretty much means nothing else will do so without resolution scaling (either DLSS or FidelityFX).

Kicking things up to ultra quality drops performance by around 35 percent on the slower GPUs at 1080p, and just about all of the GPUs we've tested so far lose 20 percent or more at 1440p ultra. 4K ultra, at native resolution? 60 fps just isn't happening, sorry.

The mighty RTX 3090 gets 46.7 fps with the release version of Cyberpunk 2077 , running the latest Nvidia 460.79 drivers. Again, for the record, that's two whole percent faster than what we saw with the preview build running the slightly older 457.51 drivers — much ado about nothing.

We weren't really expecting massive improvements in just an extra week or two of testing, and honestly, the janky aspects of Night City are far more of a concern right now than performance. You can easily drop the settings a few notches to try and boost performance, but that doesn't solve the issues of teleporting people, clipping, missions not progressing, and more.

Plus, as you'll see below with the image quality comparisons, even the low and medium presets still look good. The biggest difference you're likely to notice is the lack of shadows and ambient occlusion if you have those turned all the way down.

Cyberpunk 2077 Ray Tracing and DLSS Performance

What about running with the (nearly) maxed out RT Ultra settings? We need a few more results before we show these charts, but because Nvidia RTX cards are the only option to run RT Ultra at reasonable performance, we're going to run with DLSS enabled. We'll use DLSS Quality at 1080p, DLSS Balanced at 1440p, and DLSS Performance at 4K. (These are also the values used for DLSS Auto, as far as we can tell.)

Actually, you can try to run RT Ultra with a GTX 10-series or 16-series GPU that has at least 6GB of RAM. We did that with the GTX 1660 Super, at 720p, with FidelityFX set to a static 50 percent rendering resolution. And it worked! We got all the ray traced reflections, shadows, and lighting... at 34 fps. It was also hella blurry and not recommended. RTX hardware is needed, or at least RX 6000 (probably with FidelityFX scaling).

Cyberpunk 2077 Performance: Image Quality Comparisons

Given what we've seen in terms of performance, you're probably wondering how the game actually looks at the various settings. We have some screenshots, and we'll be digging into these more in the coming days. If you're wondering whether ray tracing makes the game look better, we'd say the answer is an unequivocal yes. Is it worth the performance hit, though? That's a bit more difficult. Here's a gallery of screenshots taken with various settings.

There's a lot to sort through, but reflections can be very noticeable in some scenes and not matter at all in others. Stand next to a car, and the presence or lack of reflections on the windows is definitely apparent—and I miss them when they're gone! Walk a few meters away from the car, however, and it's not nearly as noticeable. On the other hand, some rooms and buildings have reflective walls, and after walking around a club called Clouds with RT enabled, turning RT off made the place feel completely different. All the mirrored surfaces turn into dark walls instead.

There are other oddities with reflections, however, like the fact that V doesn't cast a reflection. We found this to be very weird, particularly for a game that allows you to play dress-up with all sorts of articles of clothing. Want to see how V looks? Either go into your inventory, or enter photo mode, or go to a bathroom mirror and press F. Yeah, we're not sure why or how the mirror turns off, but it does.

Perhaps V actually stands for Vampire, and that's why the player character doesn't cast a reflection? Running around Control and seeing Jesse in the reflective surfaces was great, and we've seen the same thing in Battlefield V , Wolfenstein Youngblood , and Watch Dogs Legion . But even in third-person perspective sitting on a motorcycle, V is missing from reflections. This omission feels like something that needs to be patched because currently the RT reflections just feel wrong with the lack of V.

What about the RT shadows and lighting? Here, the differences between rasterization and ray tracing aren't nearly as apparent. Yes, the shadows look better with RT, and you get the blended penumbra at the edges compared to a hard edge with shadow mapping. But even the RT shadows and lighting don't get everything right—vehicle headlight projections sometimes show up where they shouldn't be visible.

Basically, ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077 feels like something that's all or nothing. If you have a sufficiently fast graphics card—RTX 30-series, or maybe 2080 Super and 2080 Ti—you can run with the RT Ultra preset and DLSS and get a pleasing result. RT Medium is okay as well, but not as visually striking. But if you don't have a high-end RTX card that can do DLSS, (ie, AMD's RX 6000 GPUs), FidelityFX may be a good enough alternative to hit 60 fps. You can also try FidelityFX CAS on the Nvidia RTX cards if you want.

Cyberpunk 2077 Initial Impressions

What about the game, though? Is Cyberpunk 2077 actually good? We're not normally game critics, but most gaming sites like it quite a lot. Scores range from around 80 up to fanboytastic 100, with most complaints centering on the janky aspects of the game and the sometimes weak story telling.

This sort of game tickles all the rights spots in my brain. There are always lots of jobs and side missions vying for attention, and plenty of other activities as well. Running around this futuristic dystopian city feels great. At the same time, the game can quickly venture into the realm of too much stuff going on.

It's like many other open world games in that respect. Open the map and there are dozens of points of interest to visit, many just repeats of stuff you've already done a dozen times. Some side missions have you running around the various Night City zones looking for specific items, vehicles, or even graffiti. And every new part of town, you'll immediately get a call the first time you enter from the local fixer. "Hey, V, come on by because I've got a job for you!" Yeah, you and everyone else. Well, not everyone.

Most of the people of Night City are procedurally generated. Superficially, it looks and feels reasonable. People walk along sidewalks, stop at crosswalks, avoid cars, grumble when you bump into them, have conversations, and more. But the vast majority are just cardboard props. You can scan them for a name and details, but they're not persistent—scan someone, save your game, and then load the save, and you'll likely find the person you just scanned has disappeared.

Focus too much on any one denizen walking the streets and you can also run into problems. Sometimes they behave erratically, sometimes they teleport around a bit, and sometimes they just disappear (or pop into existence). The same can happen with automobiles, though it doesn't seem to occur as often.

Also, hopefully you like clones. There's enough randomization that you don't immediately notice the repeated people, but after a few hours you'll start to see the same models pop up again and again. Sometimes you'll run into a crowd where you'll see the same model repeated three or more times, hanging out and having a little party. Or maybe they're triplets or quadruplets that all wore the same outfit that day? Anyway, it's not bad as such, but most of the people aren't unique individuals with a schedule that they follow. Night City isn't like The Elder Scrolls in that sense.

But the story is good so far, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it all comes together. Compared to The Witcher 3 , the story and writing don't feel as strong, and the bones of The Witcher 3 's engine are readily apparent. (It had plenty of clones and cardboard cutout personalities as well.) Maybe things will pick up down the line, maybe I'll come to appreciate V as a character more. Maybe Johnny won't be such a jerk. It's also nice to have V be my version of the character, whether that's a Streetkid brawler or a Corp technical. Except, in letting players craft their own V, he/she/it/they becomes less of a focus point for the story.

There are still plenty of glitches and technical problems, unfortunately—bugs like objects floating in the air instead of dropping to the ground, people and vehicles popping into existence at the wrong time, missions failing to progress and requiring a reload. In one scene, manning a minigun in a helicopter, I had to clear out all the enemies before we could land. Except, I did that and we just kept circling for several minutes before I had to reload and try again. I don't know how many of these issues have been fixed in the release version, but teleporting entities and repetitive clones are very much still a thing.

At least full-blown crashes were rare, and the few times they happened tended to be after I changed settings (for the fifth or sixth time). That's with a very much high-end PC, however, running a relatively clean Windows 10 installation. If you have an older rig with tons of other junk running in the background, your experience might be worse.

Performance so far is generally good, provided you're willing to run at less than maxed-out settings. Midrange hardware from several years back may struggle at times, but a modern $230 GPU like the GTX 1660 Super or $270 RX 5600 XT should be more than sufficient. We'd also recommend at least a 6-core/12-thread CPU, SSD storage, and 16GB of RAM (possibly 32GB), particularly if you have a reasonably high-end GPU. Based on what we saw during testing, older generation 4-core CPUs are going to have a difficult time hitting 60 fps at higher quality settings, pretty much regardless of how fast your GPU is.

If you're itching to jump into Night City and Cyberpunk 2077 , I have no reservations in recommending it. You could hold off a few more weeks, or maybe even months, depending on how upset you get about glitches. I can live with them, but others may find them off-putting. At some point, a Deluxe / Game of the Year edition seems inevitable, so you could wait for that.

Also, this is very much an M-rated game, so if language, violence, or sex in games offend you, you're best steering clear. (There's a nudity filter, but no profanity filter, and violence is everywhere. This is very much the equivalent of an R-rated film, if that matters to you.)

For everyone else, there's plenty to do, and I can see myself spending many more hours here—and not just running benchmarks! Which I still have plenty left to do, now that the release version of the game is here. We'll be back with continuing testing over the next day (or two or three). We've got plans to do CPU and RAM testing, plus plenty of more GPUs. Go vote! And stay tuned.