Cyberpunk 2077 in the benchmark test – ComputerBase : Test |CUP | Specs |Config

After many postponements, Cyberpunk 2077 has been playable since yesterday. ComputerBase put the game in a technical test with benchmarks and analyzes. The graphics quality is very high, but it also places great demands on graphics cards. Ray tracing eats up even more performance, and it convinces in a subtle way in the form of even higher presets.

Note from December 17th: Anyone who wants to can now take part in the community benchmark marathon on Cyberpunk 2077, send in benchmarks of their own system and compare themselves directly with other community members.

It took a long time, but more than half a year late, Cyberpunk 2077 and by far the most anticipated game of 2020 was released on Thursday. The expectations of the latest game from The Witcher 3 creators were almost huge – in terms of both content and technology.

In the PC version, CD Projekt Red also uses heavy artillery. The in-house REDengine in version number “4” has been massively drilled out compared to the variant in The Witcher 3, both in terms of features and general quality. Cyberpunk 2077 can handle DirectX 12 Ultimate, among other things, supports ray tracing and DLSS. It is clear that DLSS only works with GeForce RTX. However, at the beginning there is also ray tracing according to Microsoft DXR only with these GPUs and not with Radeon RX 6000 (RDNA 2).

Cyberpunk looks breathtaking in places

Visually, the PC version has become absolutely spectacular, both with and without ray tracing. No, that doesn’t always apply to the entire game, but Cyberpunk 2077 manages over and over again that the player is downright amazed: You can make this game look great!

On the plus side are the really pretty lighting, a great character display, great animations, the simply successful design of the city and little things like the handsome smoke effects. Cyberpunk 2077 is always a feast for the eyes. Some objects seem lacking in detail, some environments are simply dreary and the blurring that is particularly well represented at the edges of the image should annoy one or the other player.

At the moment there is still no other game that comes close to this quality. It also carries the dense atmosphere that the Night City game world creates.

Lots of graphics options but not a lot of convenience

Cyberpunk 2077 brings up a decent graphics menu with numerous options to adjust the quality to your own computer. In addition to the classic menu items, there are separate ray tracing presets, individual ray tracing options, and DLSS can be configured. AMD’s FidelityFX in the form of CAS (Contrast Adaptive Sharpening) has also found its way into the game. Simply resharpening is not possible, instead the upsampling variant with subsequent resharpening is used for better performance. A desired frame rate can also be set, whereupon the resolution is dynamically adjusted.

Apart from that, there is an FPS limiter that can be freely configured between 10 and 240 frames per second. However, there are no further options, sample screenshots of the individual options and a VRAM display are also missing. After all, the individual menu items are described. Overall, other AAA games, especially Ubisoft titles, offer more.

The graphic presets don’t make a huge difference

Cyberpunk 2077 offers four different graphic presets with “Low”, “Medium”, “High” and “Ultra”, whereby the screen space reflections can be increased by an additional level to “Psycho”. There are also two separate presets for ray tracing. These use the ultra preset for normal graphics quality and switch on the render beams “on top”.

The graphic presets in Cyberpunk 2077 have a rather minor visual impact. Yes, the quality is reduced with each level, but even with the low setting, the game is not suddenly ugly. In the end, it should be at least the middle preset, otherwise the shadows and lighting and the atmosphere will suffer a lot. “High” brings significantly better reflections, which is particularly noticeable at night. The ultra setting provides fine tuning for shadows and surrounding obscuration. The fact that the psychological reflections visibly improve this cannot be seen, at least from the screenshots.

If you don’t necessarily want to play with the highest ultra preset, but are also satisfied with “high”, you can gain 17 percent of FPS on a Radeon RX 6800 XT and 16 percent on a GeForce RTX 3080. With the medium preset, there is a further boost of a decent 30 or 27 percent. With acceptable quality losses, the performance can be increased by around 50 percent. The low preset brings another big boost with an additional 35 and 32 percent, but the image quality drops significantly. On the other hand, the psychological reflections cost a whopping 33 or 31 percent of FPS: It’s not worth it.

The anti-aliasing is good, but a bit fuzzy

The anti-aliasing in Cyberpunk 2077 cannot be configured, it is active throughout, but luckily works well. Even in low resolutions such as Full HD, the image is still on a good level, although the image is quite blurry. This is a result of the anti-aliasing, but the style of the game does not appear really “sharp” in most scenes, even in high resolutions such as Ultra HD.

On the next page: Benchmarks in Full HD, WQHD and UHD as well as frame times