Introduction

"Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty" is a substantial overhaul of "Cyberpunk 2077," introducing major gameplay improvements, an expansive new district, and espionage-driven storytelling. The expansion promises revamped skill systems, combat enhancements, and a host of new content, including quests, gigs, and boss fights. With Phantom Liberty, CDPR is also releasing the "Patch 2.0" update, which is provided at no additional cost, and will bring about significant modifications to the core gameplay mechanics, benefiting all players with a refreshed and enhanced gaming experience. This update also includes support for DLSS 3.5, which we've reviewed in a separate article.



CD Projekt Red, the developer behind "Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty" and "Cyberpunk 2077," is a renowned Polish game development company celebrated for its immersive open-world RPGs. Founded in 1994, the studio is committed to delivering engaging gaming experiences. The underlying rendering engine hasn't changed that much for the 2.0 release, but they've recently added various enhancements like the "Psycho" ray tracing mode and path tracing.

This benchmark review will evaluate the performance of Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty on a wide selection of modern graphics cards, show image quality comparisons and look at what's required in terms of VRAM usage.

Screenshots

All screenshots were taken at maximum settings with path tracing ("RT Overdrive") enabled. The gallery can be navigated with the cursor keys.

Graphics Settings

• The game supports windowed, borderless and fullscreen.
• V-Sync can be disabled completely, there is no hidden FPS cap
• Optionally, you can set an FPS cap, between 10 and 240 FPS

• There's plenty of quality presets: "Low," "Medium," "High", "Ultra," "Steam Deck," "RT: Low," "RT: Medium," "RT: Ultra" and "RT: Overdrive." RT Overdrive is the setting that enables path tracing. Please note that all these settings modes enable AMD FSR or NVIDIA DLSS automatically, which might lower your image quality, so you'll have to disable them manually after activating the preset.
• Cyberpunk 2077 has support for NVIDIA DLSS upscaling, AMD FSR 2.1 and Intel XeSS 1.1. You also get support for DLSS 3 Frame Generation, DLAA, NVIDIA Reflex, and DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction (which we reviewed here)
• The field of view can be set between 70 and 100 degrees. I felt the default was a bit too narrow for me, so I picked 100
• Distracting effects like film grain, depth of field and motion blur can be disabled
• "Advanced" has a long list of settings that you can use to fine-tune performance vs graphics
• At the end of this screen is the "ray tracing" section.
• When you enable Path Tracing, all other RT technologies get disabled, because they are unnecessary (path tracing includes them all automatically).
• If you have Path Tracing disabled, then you may individually enable or disable "Ray traced Reflections," "Ray traced Sun Shadows," "Ray traced Local Shadows" and "Ray traced Lighting." RT lighting has several quality settings, ranging from "Medium," "Ultra" to "Psycho."

• With the 2.0 update, CDPR is addressing the scheduling issues on AMD CPUs with SMT.
• You now get an option in the "Gameplay" section that lets you select "AMD Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT)" between "Auto", "On" and "Off". On uses all logical cores, Off uses physical cores only.