Should you play Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty with ray-tracing? Visual and performance differences explored

Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the few games with heavy ray-tracing implementation. It supports ray-traced shadows, lighting, and even reflections, and the game looks fantastic with these effects turned on. Moreover, it recently added support for path tracing, which is ray tracing in its full form and can only be properly enjoyed on the latest and most powerful RTX 40 series cards.

However, the general ray tracing settings can be used on older RTX 30 and 20 series cards as well. Powerful GPUs from both these generations can run the game at playable framerates with these settings enabled.

However, many are wondering if they should use ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077 at all since the game looks fantastic even with rasterization effects. Let's go over performance data to evaluate whether the hardware-accelerated ray tracing effects are worth it.

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Ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077 is a slippery slope

Ray tracing is generally very hardware-demanding in most video games, and Cyberpunk 2077 is no exception to this formula. With the latest 2.0 update and Phantom Liberty expansion, the game has gotten even more demanding on hardware, making it difficult for last-gen graphics cards to play the title properly.

Moreover, Cyberpunk 2077 has multiple ray tracing presets, with Psycho being the most hardware-demanding among them. We don't recommend anything over High for mid-range and budget cards and Ultra for flagship GPUs. The Psycho preset will tank framerates to unplayable levels on every graphics card, including the RTX 4080 and 4090.

Following is a list of framerates recorded with ray tracing (with the ultra preset) and path tracing turned on as compared to keeping the settings off in the game:

	Ray tracing OFF	Ray tracing ON	Path tracing ON
RTX 4080	115	52	39
RTX 3080	99	48	32
RTX 3070	87	42	21
RTX 3060	58	35	13
RTX 3050	37	29	9

Ray tracing significantly tanks framerates, and with path tracing, the game is barely playable. Only the most powerful graphics cards in the market, like the RTX 3080 and 4080, can hit 30 FPS with this setting turned on. However, most other budget GPUs faltered with the setting, with the RTX 3050 being unable to play the title with base ray tracing effects turned on.

Even without DLSS, most high-end GPUs can't hit 60 FPS in the first-person shooter with ray tracing turned on. Therefore, the visual effects come at a steep performance penalty. Moreover, rasterization lighting effects have gotten so good that you won't be able to tell the difference between a ray-traced scene and one rendered with traditional techniques.

Therefore, this leads us to recommend turning ray tracing off in Cyberpunk 2077 if you are on a budget or mid-range graphics card. You can use the effects on the RTX 3090 or 4090 if you are not playing at 1080p or 1440p since the performance would still remain above 60 FPS. However, other than this, you should stick to traditional rasterization in the game.