Best Cyberpunk 2077 Ray Tracing Settings in 2026: Competitive and Low-End Presets

Cyberpunk 2077 is a different beast than most ray-traced games. REDengine 4’s rendering pipeline is deferred, which means its G-buffer is enormous, and its path-tracing implementation (RT Overdrive) doesn’t simply layer on top of rasterized lighting—it replaces it entirely. That architectural decision creates a specific optimization problem: you cannot treat every setting equally, because several options become redundant or actively harmful once you enable Overdrive. The game is also famously CPU-bound in dense Night City sectors regardless of GPU tier, so settings like crowd density will cap your framerate long before your graphics card breaks a sweat. Understanding these quirks is the entire point of tuning your settings for this game specifically.

Verdict at a glance

The short answer: on an RTX 50-series card, turn on the Ray Tracing: Overdrive preset with DLSS 4 (Transformer model) Super Resolution, Ray Reconstruction and Frame Generation, and keep the rendered frame rate above roughly 60 FPS before frame generation. On RTX 40-series and mid-range RTX 50 cards, use Ray Tracing: Ultra or Medium with DLSS Quality or Balanced. Radeon RX 9000 owners should use standard ray tracing with FSR 4 rather than path tracing.

• Best for path tracing (Overdrive): RTX 5080 or faster, using DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation at 1440p or 4K.
• Best mid-range ray tracing: RTX 5070 with Ray Tracing: Ultra, DLSS Quality and Ray Reconstruction at 1440p.
• Best AMD option: Radeon RX 9070 XT with Ray Tracing: Medium and FSR 4 Quality.
• Best budget ray tracing: RTX 5060 Ti 16GB with Ray Tracing: Low or Medium and DLSS Balanced at 1080p.

Version note: the settings in this guide are based on Cyberpunk 2077 patch 2.31 (September 2025), still the latest PC patch as of October 2026, plus the DLSS 4, FSR 4 and XeSS 2 support added in updates 2.21 and 2.3. Menu names can differ slightly from older guides.

Products at a glance: MSI RTX 5060 Ti 16G Shadow 2X OC (best budget RT), GIGABYTE RTX 5070 Gaming OC (best mid-range RT), ASUS Prime RX 9070 XT (best AMD), MSI RTX 5080 Ventus 3X OC (best for Overdrive).

Quick Preset

Ray Tracing Presets by GPU Tier

The Quick Preset table above is organised by play style. These tables are organised by hardware, using the option names in the current game menu (Graphics tab, patch 2.31). They are based on published benchmark data from TweakTown, TechRadar and other outlets plus NVIDIA’s and AMD’s feature documentation, not our own testing, so treat them as a starting point and adjust by a notch if your 1% lows dip.

Low tier: RTX 4060 / RTX 5060 / RTX 5060 Ti, 1080p

Mid tier: RTX 4070 Super / RTX 5070 / RTX 5070 Ti, 1440p

High tier: RTX 4080 Super / RTX 5080 / RTX 5090, 1440p-4K

AMD tier: Radeon RX 9070 / RX 9070 XT, 1440p

Settings That Matter Most

RT Overdrive (Path Tracing)

This is the single most consequential toggle in the game. Overdrive activates CD Projekt Red’s fully path-traced lighting, which traces only a small number of rays per pixel and relies on denoising to resolve global illumination, reflections, and shadows together. The visual difference is dramatic—wet streets reflect neon signs with physical accuracy, and interior rooms receive bounce light that rasterized GI cannot replicate. The cost is equally dramatic: expect a 50-60% FPS reduction compared to Standard RT on the same hardware. In 2026, this mode is only viable on RTX 4070 Ti Super and above if you want playable framerates without heavy upscaling. The critical insight here is that once Overdrive is active, several traditional settings become redundant or counterproductive (covered below).

Mirror Quality

Mirror Quality controls the resolution of reflections in interactive mirrors, mostly the bathroom and apartment mirrors you walk up to. It only costs performance while a mirror is on screen, and you will notice it rarely. Competitive and low-end players should set it to Low; balanced players can afford High.

Screen Space Reflections

This is where REDengine 4’s architecture creates a trap. When you enable Ray-Traced Reflections, screen space reflections are largely redundant because RT rays already resolve reflective surfaces. Lowering or disabling Screen Space Reflections Quality is a safe saving whenever Ray-Traced Reflections are active.

Volumetric Fog Resolution

The engine renders volumetric fog as a full-screen compute pass with multiple ray-marching steps. At its highest setting it is one of the more expensive non-RT options. At Low, the visual difference is imperceptible unless you are standing inside a fog volume looking directly into a headlight cone. Set this to Low or Medium.

Crowd Density

Crowd Density, found in the Gameplay tab, is a CPU-bound setting that affects your GPU only through draw call overhead. Night City’s downtown sectors spawn NPCs and vehicles that pathfind independently, and REDengine 4’s threading model struggles to parallelize their AI updates efficiently. On a six-core CPU such as a Ryzen 5 5600X or Core i5-12400, lowering Crowd Density can noticeably improve frame rates and 1% lows in Dogtown or City Center. Competitive players who care about 1% lows should set it to Low. The visual penalty is mostly emptier streets and sidewalks.

Upscaling and Frame Generation

DLSS 3.5’s Ray Reconstruction is the most important upscaler feature for this game specifically. It replaces the engine’s hand-tuned ray-tracing denoisers with an AI model trained on high-quality offline renders. In Standard RT mode, it cleans up the splotchy RT shadow noise that the stock denoiser produces poorly. In Overdrive mode, it is effectively mandatory because the path tracer’s raw output is far noisier than the denoiser can handle, and Ray Reconstruction recovers detail that would otherwise be smeared away. If you have an RTX card, enable it.

FSR 3’s frame generation works in Cyberpunk but produces more visible artifacting than DLSS 3 FG because the game’s camera motion (first-person with frequent head bob and vehicle cameras) creates motion vector inaccuracies that FSR 3’s flow field generator handles less gracefully. If you must use FSR, run it without frame generation and accept the lower framerate.

XeSS has seen a quality improvement with the latest model updates and is a reasonable middle ground for AMD GPU users who cannot use DLSS. Set it to Quality mode; the game’s high-frequency detail (neon signs, chain-link fences) benefits from XeSS’s sharper reconstruction compared to FSR 2.

DLSS 4, FSR 4 and XeSS 2 in Current Patches

The upscaling section above was written around DLSS 3.5, FSR 3 and older XeSS. Cyberpunk 2077 has moved on: update 2.21 added DLSS 4, and update 2.3 added FSR 4 and XeSS 2. Here is what changed and how to use it.

• DLSS 4 Transformer model: the game lets you choose between the older CNN model and the newer Transformer model for DLSS Super Resolution, Ray Reconstruction and DLAA. The Transformer model gives noticeably sharper detail and more stable neon and foliage in path-traced scenes, at a small performance cost. It works on every RTX card, so RTX 20, 30 and 40 owners benefit too.
• Multi Frame Generation: RTX 50-series cards can generate one, two or three extra frames per rendered frame (2x, 3x or 4x). It is how an RTX 5080 shows well over 100 FPS at 4K with path tracing, according to TechRadar’s coverage. Generated frames add smoothness but not responsiveness, so keep your base frame rate around 60 FPS or higher.
• Faster single Frame Generation: the DLSS 4 update also made standard Frame Generation faster and lighter on VRAM for RTX 40 and 50 cards.
• FSR 4: AMD’s machine-learning upscaler is a major improvement over FSR 3 for Radeon RX 9000 cards and requires Adrenalin 25.8.1 or later. It is the right choice on an RX 9070 XT; XeSS remains the better fallback only on older Radeon cards that cannot run FSR 4.
• XeSS 2: Intel’s latest version, with its own frame generation, is the best option on Arc GPUs and a usable alternative on older non-RTX cards.

Outside the Game

Shader compilation on first launch after a driver update can take several minutes depending on your hardware. Do not Alt-Tab during this phase; REDengine 4’s shader cache system has historically corrupted when interrupted. After compilation, subsequent launches are nearly instant.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a single-player game and does not use Easy Anti-Cheat. If you experience periodic freezes lasting a few seconds in dense areas, update your GPU driver and close overlays or background capture tools first, then try toggling Windows Game Mode.

Set your power plan to High Performance or Ultimate Performance (via registry if the latter is hidden). The game’s CPU thread scheduling benefits from preventing cores from parking between cell loads. NVIDIA Reflex should be enabled in-game, as it lowers system latency, which matters most when frame generation is on.

Settings to Leave Alone

Color Precision should stay at High. Medium saves only a sliver of performance and can introduce banding in skies and neon gradients.

Anisotropy (texture filtering) costs almost nothing on modern GPUs. Leave it at 16 and forget about it.

Level of Detail (LOD) controls how far detailed geometry is drawn. Leave it at High; lowering it causes visible popping on building facades and saves little performance on modern GPUs.

GPUs That Suit These Ray Tracing Presets

If your current card cannot hold the preset you want, these current-generation GPUs map directly to the tiers above.

MSI GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16G Shadow 2X OC

msi Gaming RTX 5060 Ti 16G Shadow 2X OC Graphics Card (16GB GDDR7, 128-bit, Extreme Performance: TBA MHz, DisplayPort x 3 2.1a, HDMI 2.1b, NVIDIA Blackwell Architecture)

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The 16GB RTX 5060 Ti is the most affordable card we would buy specifically for ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077. It matches the low-tier preset: Ray Tracing: Low or Medium at 1080p with DLSS Balanced and Ray Reconstruction. The 16GB of GDDR7 matters here because ray tracing, high-resolution textures and frame generation all add to VRAM use, and 8GB cards are prone to stutter in this game once those features are combined.

Key specs from MSI and NVIDIA: Blackwell architecture with fifth-generation Tensor cores and fourth-generation RT cores, 4,608 CUDA cores, 16GB GDDR7 on a 128-bit bus, PCIe 5.0 x8, DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation, 180W total graphics power and a compact dual-fan Shadow 2X cooler.

Strengths: access to every DLSS 4 feature the game supports, including Multi Frame Generation, at a budget-to-mid-range tier, plus low power and quiet operation. Weaknesses: path tracing is beyond it at playable base frame rates, and the 128-bit bus limits 1440p ray tracing. Compared with an RTX 3060, the card the FAQ discusses, it offers a newer DLSS feature set and far better RT throughput.

GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 5070 Gaming OC 12G

GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 5070 Gaming OC 12G Graphics Card, 12GB 192-bit GDDR7, PCIe 5.0, WINDFORCE Cooling System, GV-N5070GAMING OC-12GD Video Card

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The RTX 5070 is the mid-tier sweet spot for this game at 1440p. Ray Tracing: Ultra with DLSS Quality and Ray Reconstruction runs well on it, and with DLSS 4 frame generation it can even attempt Overdrive at 1440p using DLSS Performance. TweakTown’s review found DLSS 4 delivered a large boost in path-traced Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p compared with running without frame generation.

Key specs from GIGABYTE and NVIDIA: 6,144 CUDA cores, 12GB GDDR7 on a 192-bit bus, PCIe 5.0, DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation, 250W total graphics power, a 650W system power recommendation and GIGABYTE’s triple-fan WINDFORCE cooler.

Strengths: strong ray tracing per tier and the full DLSS 4 feature set. Weaknesses: 12GB of VRAM is enough for 1440p but tight for 4K with path tracing, and its path-tracing performance without frame generation is similar to an RTX 4070 Super, so the base frame rate can be low for responsive combat in Overdrive.

ASUS Prime Radeon RX 9070 XT OC 16GB

The RX 9070 XT is the AMD card to choose for Cyberpunk 2077 with ray tracing. RDNA 4 roughly doubled ray tracing throughput per compute unit over the previous generation, and FSR 4, added in update 2.3, finally gives Radeon owners a machine-learning upscaler with image quality close to DLSS. Use the AMD tier preset: Ray Tracing: Medium with FSR 4 Quality at 1440p.

Key specs from ASUS and AMD: RDNA 4 with 64 compute units and third-generation ray accelerators, 16GB GDDR6 on a 256-bit bus, PCIe 5.0, FSR 4 support, a 304W reference board power and ASUS’s triple-fan Prime cooler in a 2.5-slot design.

Strengths: excellent rasterised performance and 16GB of VRAM, plus FSR 4 support from Adrenalin 25.8.1 onwards. Weaknesses: path tracing remains much slower than on NVIDIA’s equivalent cards, there is no Ray Reconstruction equivalent in this game, and power draw is higher than the RTX 5070 Ti.

MSI GeForce RTX 5080 16G Ventus 3X OC Black

msi Gaming RTX 5080 16G Ventus 3X OC Black Graphics Card (16GB GDDR7, 256-bit, Extreme Clock 2640 MHz, DisplayPort x 3 2.1a, HDMI 2.1b, NVIDIA Blackwell Architecture)

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The RTX 5080 is the card for the high-tier preset: Ray Tracing: Overdrive with DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation at 1440p or 4K. TechRadar reported Cyberpunk 2077 running above 120 FPS at 4K with full path tracing on an RTX 5080 when DLSS 4 and frame generation are enabled, which makes Overdrive genuinely enjoyable on a high-refresh display.

Key specs from MSI and NVIDIA: 10,752 CUDA cores, 16GB GDDR7 on a 256-bit bus, a 2640MHz extreme clock on this Ventus 3X OC Black model, three DisplayPort 2.1a and one HDMI 2.1b, DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation, 360W total graphics power and an 850W system power recommendation.

Strengths: the cheapest route to comfortable path tracing at 4K, with 16GB of VRAM for high textures. Weaknesses: premium-tier pricing, a large triple-fan cooler, and much of the 4K frame rate comes from generated frames, so latency-sensitive players may prefer DLSS Quality at 1440p. Compared with the RTX 4080 Super, it adds Multi Frame Generation and a newer RT core design.

How We Built These Presets

We did not bench-test these settings ourselves. The presets and GPU tiers are based on CD Projekt Red’s patch notes, NVIDIA’s and AMD’s documentation for DLSS 4 and FSR 4, published Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark results from outlets including TweakTown and TechRadar, and community reports on stability and VRAM use. Expect your own results to vary with CPU, resolution and the area of Night City you are in.

FAQ

Why does my FPS drop randomly even with good hardware?

Night City’s streaming system loads new cell data when you cross district boundaries (visible as brief hitching). This is a storage and CPU issue, not a GPU one. An NVMe SSD reduces but does not eliminate the stutter. If your 1% lows are poor, reduce Crowd Density first, as it is the most common culprit for unpredictable frame spikes.

Does RT Overdrive require DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction?

Technically no, but practically yes. Without Ray Reconstruction, the path-traced image looks like a watercolor painting smeared with noise. The standard denoisers cannot clean up the sparse path-traced samples well enough at 60 FPS to produce a clean image. Ray Reconstruction is the difference between Overdrive being a showcase feature and being an unwatchable mess.

Is Ray-Traced Lighting still useful without path tracing?

Yes. Without path tracing, Ray-Traced Lighting is what provides realistic bounce light in interior spaces. The rasterized fallback produces flat, poorly-lit rooms where the only illumination is direct light sources. Ray-Traced Lighting at Medium or Ultra noticeably changes how office buildings, apartments, and the Afterlife club look. Keep it enabled when path tracing is off. In Overdrive, it is handled by the path tracer and the separate toggle is irrelevant.

Can I play path-traced mode on an RTX 3060?

You can technically enable it, but expect 15-20 FPS at 1080p with DLSS Quality. The RTX 3060’s 12GB of VRAM is enough for Overdrive at 1080p, but its ray-tracing throughput is far too low for the path tracer. You are better off running Standard RT with DLSS Quality and getting a stable 60-70 FPS than struggling with a path-traced slideshow.

Does DLSS 4 work on older RTX cards in Cyberpunk 2077?

Yes, for Super Resolution, Ray Reconstruction and DLAA using the Transformer model. Frame Generation requires an RTX 40-series card, and Multi Frame Generation requires an RTX 50-series card.

Can AMD cards use path tracing in Cyberpunk 2077?

They can enable it, but performance is far below NVIDIA’s equivalents. FSR 4 helps on RX 9000 cards, yet standard ray tracing at the Medium preset is the better experience on Radeon hardware.

Which Cyberpunk 2077 patch are these settings for?

Patch 2.31 from September 2025, the latest PC patch as of October 2026, including the upscaler support added in updates 2.21 (DLSS 4) and 2.3 (FSR 4 and XeSS 2).