Introduction

Cyberpunk 2077 from CD Projekt RED is possibly the most highly anticipated open-world action RPG in recent years. It shares its namesake with the near-future year it's based in—a post-apocalyptic world in which nation states have given way to mega cities run by corporations; where some of the last vestiges of civilization are getting by in a cyberpunk world full of people with cybernetic implants to enhance their abilities. The cyberpunk-meets-neon-noir scheme draws many parallels from the Detroit of the original RoboCop and Los Angeles of Blade Runner, in a fictional place called Night City. You play as "V," a street criminal out on a quest to steal an implant that promises immortality.

The main quest depends heavily on the storyline you choose at the game's beginning—nomad, street gangster, or corporate sleuth—and is fairly long, with elaborate missions spanning static locations and vehicles. But the world of Night City also has hundreds of hours in side-quests for you. CDPR has clearly designed Cyberpunk 2077 to be a game where people are immersed into a vast open-world campaign not unlike GTA or RDR, although on a grander scale.



Bringing Cyberpunk 2077 to life is the new RED Engine by CDPR, which has been designed for the next generation, with support for real-time raytracing. CDPR clearly envisioned this game to be its magnum opus and focused on aesthetics as much as its core gameplay content. Cyberpunk supports cutting-edge features, such as real-time raytracing which brings shadows and reflections to life. Even without raytracing, Cyberpunk is an extremely taxing game, which could well be the Crysis of our time. The next page will show you the eye candy on offer. To help make the game playable to a broader audience, CDPR leveraged the NVIDIA DLSS (deep-learning supersampling) feature, which adds a vast amount of performance at comparable image quality. It also supports AMD FidelityFX Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS).

In this review, we take a close look at the world CDPR meticulously put together for us, across a selection of modern graphics cards and three popular gaming resolutions. We also explore the visual uplift and performance impacts of NVIDIA DLSS and RTX raytracing.