Cyberpunk 2077 has a lot of graphics options, and not all of them cost the same amount of performance for the visual improvement they give. Here’s where to spend your GPU budget.

Settings with high performance cost, modest visual payoff

Lower these first if you need more FPS:

  • Volumetric Fog / Clouds Quality — expensive, and the difference is subtle outside of specific weather.
  • Crowd Density — more NPCs on screen costs real GPU time; Medium looks close to High in motion.
  • Screen Space Reflections — costly, and largely replaced in visual quality by ray-traced reflections if you’re using RT anyway.
  • Motion Blur — free performance-wise to turn off, and many players prefer the clarity without it.

Settings worth keeping high

These affect visual quality more than they cost in FPS:

  • Texture Quality — mostly a VRAM cost, not a GPU compute cost. Keep this as high as your VRAM allows.
  • Shadow Quality (Medium/High) — going all the way to Ultra rarely looks meaningfully different from High.
  • Field of View — free performance-wise; set to your preference.

Ray tracing: only if your GPU can afford it

Ray-traced lighting is the single most expensive setting category in the game. Rough guidance:

  • RTX 4060 / RX 7600 tier: skip ray tracing, use DLSS/FSR Quality mode instead for the FPS headroom.
  • RTX 4070 / RX 7800 XT tier: Ray Tracing Medium with DLSS/FSR Balanced is usually playable at 1440p.
  • RTX 4080+ / RX 7900 XTX: Ray Tracing Ultra or Path Tracing becomes realistic, especially with DLSS Frame Generation.

Upscaling (DLSS / FSR / XeSS)

Turning on upscaling is close to a free performance win at 1440p and 4K — the “Quality” preset is very hard to distinguish from native resolution in motion, and it recovers a significant amount of frame rate. Start here before lowering other settings if you’re GPU-limited.

A practical starting point

If you’re not sure where to start: set everything to High, turn ray tracing off, enable DLSS/FSR Quality, then use our FPS Calculator to sanity-check whether your hardware should be hitting your target frame rate — if it’s well short, that’s when to start lowering the settings above.