Running Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra on PC Actually Works Now

Redmond released a bunch of updates over the years and this game is finally in a place where you can crank settings to the max without watching your framerate tank. It's not automatic though. There are specific things you need to configure manually or you'll end up with weird artifacts, stuttering in night city traffic, or just a game that runs well but looks like it has some texture issues. I spent about three weeks fine-tuning my build because I kept hitting the same problems over and over. The baseline requirement for Cyberpunk 2077 Gameplay Ending Pc Ultra Graphics is a GPU that can handle path tracing or at least heavy rasterization at 4K or high refresh 1440p. A 4080 or 4090 will get you there comfortably with DLSS. An AMD equivalent like the 7900 XTX works too but you trade some ray tracing performance for solid raw raster numbers. The game is GPU-bound at Ultra, so your card matters more than your CPU at this point. I ran into an issue on my first build where the game would stutter heavily during the ending sequence even though my averages looked fine in most other scenes. The problem turned out to be shader compilation caching. It doesn't pre-cache everything properly on SSDs under certain conditions. I deleted the entire ShaderCache folder in AppData and let it rebuild from scratch, which took about forty-five minutes, and the stutters vanished. You'll want to do that if you've been having random hitching.

How to Get Cyberpunk 2077 Gameplay Ending Pc Ultra Graphics Working Smoothly

Open the in-game settings and go to Graphics. Set the preset to Ultra. Then adjust these individually rather than leaving everything on auto. The critical ones are the frame generation and upscaling settings. If you have an NVIDIA 40-series card, set DLSS Quality to Performance or Balanced and turn Frame Generation on. The difference between Quality and Performance at Ultra is almost invisible visually but the performance gain is massive. You can set resolution scale to 75 or 80 percent and it still looks sharp on most modern displays. Higher isn't always better here. At very low scales you start seeing shimmering on distant geometry that doesn't really go away even at higher settings. For path tracing specifically, which is what most people mean when they ask about Ultra graphics, the performance hit is real. Path tracing lights every light source in the scene with ray tracing calculations. It costs roughly double what normal ray tracing costs on most hardware. Enable it in the Graphics tab and pick Path Tracing Quality based on your GPU. A 4090 can handle Path Tracing at Quality with Frame Generation at 4K without breaking a sweat. Anything below that and you're either dropping to High or accepting a lower target framerate. The game does offer a Path Tracing Performance preset too which is more reasonable for cards in the 4070 Ti Super range. Texture streaming is another area that trips people up. Ultra textures at 4K require a lot of VRAM. If you have less than 16 gigabytes you might see texture pop-in or the game struggling to stream properly. Set Texture Streaming Budget to maximum and make sure your GPU has enough memory. I had a friend who ran an RTX 3080 with ten gigabytes and tried Ultra textures at 4K. The game was constantly swapping textures in and out and you could see it happening. He dropped the texture quality to High and the problem went away with no noticeable visual difference on screen.

There's a setting called V-Sync that matters more than you'd think. In Cyberpunk 2077, turning V-Sync off can actually give you smoother input response but it introduces screen tearing. Turning it on locks you to your monitor's refresh rate. If you're using an G-Sync or FreeSync compatible display, set it to On (Adaptive). This gives you the best of both worlds and prevents tearing without the input lag penalty. I found this after months of just having V-Sync on and noticing the game felt slightly sluggish compared to clips online where people had it set to adaptive. Photo mode is where most of the really good screenshots come from. You can access it by pressing the designated key during gameplay or pause. The lighting options in photo mode are separate from the in-game graphics settings and sometimes look better because they strip away UI elements and give you more control over depth of field and exposure. If you're going for that polished ultrawide cinematic look, photo mode lets you adjust the aspect ratio independently. That's useful if you want to export screenshots that don't have the letterboxing most people see on ultrawide monitors. The ending sequence itself is the most demanding part of the game. Long, continuous shots in highly detailed environments with dynamic lighting. Expect your framerate to drop the most here compared to standard gameplay. If you're getting significant frame time spikes during the ending, close all background applications and make sure your GPU isn't thermal throttling. My own system would clock down after about twenty minutes of sustained path tracing because the back of my GPU hit 83 degrees. I opened the case and improved airflow and the thermal headroom came back. That alone prevented the slowdown during longer sequences.

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Cyberpunk 2077 Ending! - 4K Ultra RTX gameplay - YouTube
Cyberpunk 2077 Ending! - 4K Ultra RTX gameplay - YouTube

Quick configuration summary for a high-end rig: Ultra preset, DLSS Quality or Performance with Frame Generation, Path Tracing if your GPU supports it, V-Sync Adaptive, Texture Streaming Budget at maximum, and resolution scale around 80 percent. This combination typically delivers consistent framerates above 60 frames per second at 4K on an RTX 4090. A 4080 sits closer to 50 to 55 frames per second with the same settings. Anything less powerful than a 4070 Ti Super will need concessions in the Path Tracing or Ray Tracing settings to stay smooth. I should mention the drawbacks too. Ultra graphics at this level are extremely demanding. Even top-tier hardware can struggle. The game isn't well optimized for CPU-only scenarios if you happen to have a weaker processor paired with a strong GPU. I noticed stuttering on a Ryzen 5 5600X with a 4090 that I wouldn't have seen with a 5800X3D. The CPU can become a bottleneck in dense urban areas regardless of how good the GPU is. Also, Ultra settings with ray tracing enabled will eat through your VRAM. If you're streaming games or running other applications simultaneously, you'll run into issues. Make sure the game has dedicated resources before launching. If you can't meet those requirements, there's always the option to drop to High or experiment with the Performance Preset that CDPR added later. It's surprisingly good and gives you most of the visual fidelity at a fraction of the cost. The jump from High to Ultra is noticeable but not as dramatic as the performance difference between them.