is without doubt one of the biggest ray tracing games that’s ever been released on PC, and it should come as no surprise that it’s also one of the most demanding. Like Metro Exodus before it, CD Projekt Red have gone all in on this ultra-realistic lighting technology to make Night City look and feel like a living, breathing city, using everything from ray traced reflections and shadows to three separate ray traced illumination techniques. Indeed, if you’ve been searching for an excuse to show off your new Nvidia RTX card, this is definitely the game you’ve been waiting for. Or is it? Night City can look spectacular with all of its ray traced bells and whistles switched on, but only a select few GPUs are really capable of depicting this futuristic cityscape at playable frame rates.
To help you get the best ray tracing performance, I’ve put together this handy guide, showing you what the game’s ray tracing looks like in the flesh compared to its regular non-ray traced quality settings, as well as what kind of performance you can expect to see at 1080p, 1440p and 4K across almost every Nvidia RTX card that’s available today, from the entry-level RTX 2060 all the way up to the brand-new RTX 3080. Regardless of whether you’re an existing RTX owner or are looking to upgrade once hardware prices settle down again, here’s everything you need to know about Cyberpunk 2077’s ray tracing settings.