8 ways to make Cyberpunk 2077 run faster

Put the pedal to the metal, choom.

- BRAD CHACOS

Cyberpunk 2077 is breathtaking. The densely packed, stunningly vertical streets and teeming crowds make Night City feel more alive than any other virtual metropolis to date. Real-time ray tracing transforms Cyberpunk from feeling like a very pretty video game to feeling like an actual place.

All that eye candy doesn’t come free, though. This game can bring even the most powerful graphics cards to their knees when you max out every visual option.

Rather than bang out a bunch of benchmarks that show how crippling the game is at Ultra settings, our Cyberpunk 2077 performance optimization tips can help you find the best PC settings to tone down so everything else can remain cranked up.

Well, as cranked up as possible. Cyberpunk 2077 even makes the $1,500 GeForce RTX 3090 (go.pcworld.com/rt39) we’ve been testing it with struggle to maintain 60 frames per second at 4K resolution with all the visual bells and whistles enabled—unless you make these tweaks.

1. TURN OFF YOUR FRAMERATE COUNTER

Let’s start with a quick mind hack. If you’re an enthusiast who keeps an overlay with your gaming frame rate plastered in the corner of your screen, turn it off before you start tinkering with settings.