Cyberpunk 2077 is here and it’s here 57 years earlier than what its title says. And yes, this is the most original joke ever.
So as I was charting data and stats and numbers for the RTX 3080 which I borrowed from a friend, the launch of cyberpunk 2077 couldn’t have come at a better time.
So I was like what the heck and I rigorously tested it on both the RTX 3070 and the RTX 3080 and compared screen recordings of how good or bad the different DLSS modes look. I will also share the different DLSS mode benchmarks with and without RTX here.
System specs as follow:
Processor – Ryzen 9 3900X
RAM – Corsair 64GB(16×4) CL16 3200Mhz memory
Motherboard – Asus TUF GAMING X570-PLUS
Graphic Card – RTX 3070 FE / Galax RTX 3080 SG
Case – CM MasterBox 520
Storage – MyDigitalSSD BPX Pro 960GB
PSU – Corsair RM650x 80 PLUS Gold Fully Modular 650Watts
The scenes I tested weren’t combating ones so it’s fair to say during any intense combat scenarios the average FPS could drop even more.
So let’s start with how the RTX 3070 performs at 1440P. Clearly, the cyberpunk guys knew what the psycho RTX preset will do to a system and they aptly named it that. The game is unplayable on RT psycho with DLSS off. But it sees about a 75% boost in DLSS quality mode and about 20% from Quality to balanced.
In 4K, it’s absolute garbage with DLSS off and a little less garbage on the DLSS quality mode. And the DLSS balanced mode doesn’t see a huge improvement either.
In RT ultra mode with DLSS Off the game just passes over the 30 FPS mark and gets almost twice the frame boost as soon as you hop on to DLSS quality mode. But from there the improvements are just marginal.
In 4K, let’s just forget I put the DLSS off framerate there and in DLSS quality mode the 30 FPS mark is just not satisfactory for the PCMR race. But there is a decent performance gain of about 50% in DLSS auto. But the mystery behind that auto mode isn’t clear to us. And by us, I mean I.
The cyberpunk guys quite cautiously named the lowest RT mode as medium and not low or lowest, as it might sound negative and no one can happily gloat something like that hey, I get 80 FPS at the lowest ray tracing mode. So yeah, the game happily touches 80 FPS in balanced mode and from there it sees about 10-20% performance enhancements from performance to ultra-performance DLSS modes.
4K performance is better too on the RT medium setting, as compared to the previous RT modes as it varies from 45 to 75 FPS.
The VRAM consumption never peaked above 7GB on the 4K resolution and 6GB at 1440P.
And here are couple of summarizable graphs of 1440P and 4K with 1 or 2 more graphs that I didn’t share earlier.
So yeah the RTX 3070 can’t happily run this game at 4K till you hop on to the DLSS ultra-performance mode. But I am not quite happy with the ultra-performance mode and I am going to share why right after the RTX 3080 benchmarks.
So on 1440P RT psycho mode with DLSS off the RTX 3080 gets a decent 39 FPS but right after you turn on the DLSS to quality and balanced mode you see a massive gain of 80% which is good for your eyes as asserted by some top PCMR scientists.
At 4K cyberpunk just destroys the RTX 3080 at the psycho mode which is, well, psycho for sure. To even have it remotely playable you can’t use anything below the DLSS balanced mode.
But on RT ultra at 1440P, things get much better with performance rising from 45 FPS to 75 FPS with DLSS in quality mode. But notice the performance at Ultra settings with both RT and DLSS Off, and both RT and DLSS ON, the frame rate is absolutely the same. So it’s better to sometimes let the code do its thing too.
On 4K, turning off the RT and DLSS didn’t help much this time, and actually keeping it at DLSS auto gave a decent playable framerate. And let’s just be honest, there’s no one who would want to play this game with the settings on the lower 2 graphs at 4K.
On the RT medium setting at 1440P, you’d find ample fun in all the different DLSS modes. I mean the 113 and 92 FPS marks are great performances but we’d asses in just a momemnt why I am not a big fan of those.
On 4K, the DLSS performance mode will get you around 60 FPS but the balanced mode is not looking bad either.
Across all the tests, even at 4K the game never hogged more than 7GB of VRAM. I’d say these numbers look quite close to what we saw with the RTX 3070 too.
Here are the summarized charts of both 1440P and 4K with the RTX 3080. Pause and enjoy.
The RTX 3080 costs 40% more than the RTX 3070, but the performance gain here from both of these cards across the average of all the tests isn’t anywhere close to that. It’s roughly around 20% and this is exactly why I never ever buy the most top tier components of anything. And also because I never have that much money available to burn.
Now I’d say that I’d rather prefer balanced DLSS option rather than anything else. You can clearly see here how blurry the performance and how terribly blurry the ultra-performance scenes look like.
Also, the flickering around the edges of various assets here in the performance and ultra-performance mode is terrible too and almost makes the game completely useless to me personally. So yeah stick with the DLSS quality or balanced mode at least. Definitely tinker with the other settings rather than depending solely on DLSS. The quality and balanced mode aren’t bad in any sense and are good to play with. But if they are not able to yield good performance on your card then better stay away from turning on RT on this game as it definitely looks beautiful anyway without it.
But if you are someone who recently bought the RTX 3000 series or the newer Radeon 6000 series cards, listening to that would make you feel like slapping me. So thank god this is a video format.
Of course, after the many optimizations, this game will go through, it will definitely keep getting better but we have no idea how much or if that would even be as drastic as people are already expecting.
That’s all. Stay safe peeps. MuBot out.