Performance and quality: can we haz both, pleez?

Not sure why I'm speaking LOLcats today, and in a public post to boot O_o

Anyway, Cyberpunk 2077 has attracted lots of players after the 1.6 Edgerunners update, and many of you have been asking for advice on how to make the game perform better in VR. Let me begin by stating that the problem is your typical triangle of constraints. Cheap hardware, image quality, frame rate: choose two out of three []-)

For example, you can upgrade to the incredible NVIDIA RTX 4090 (assuming you can actually find one in stock, which I haven't been able to yet), and have perfect image quality with prodigious frame rate. Several Patrons report ~50 fps with everything maxed out, a resolution of 3920x3920 and Ray Tracing set to Psycho (completely out of this world!), or steady 90-120 fps with the same settings and just a bit more DLSS thrown in.

Or you can go the way I suggested with my RealConfig defaults: mostly Low settings, with a few important corrections like Texture Quality and Level of Detail on High, plus Color Precision and Mirrors on Medium, and make not-so-sparkly hardware perform well at high resolutions and frame rates, again possibly with some help from DLSS or FSR.

Dear friend and VR expert Dr Greg (be sure to subscribe to his channel, as he celebrated 1,000 subscribers today and he deserves at least 10x more!) in the video above suggests a slightly different approach: most settings on Medium, a few tweaks to resolution and DLSS quality, and a sprinkle of mods to optimize the game.

If you struggle to make CP2077 perform acceptably in VR on your system, I suggest you do the following. First of all, you'll want to establish a baseline. So, start afresh from a pristine copy of the game, without any other mods installed. If you already had the game running with tons of third-party mods, make a new installation in a separate folder, so you won't have to throw away your previous setup.

Once you have the game running unmodded and correctly in 2D, install only my VR conversion and run RealConfig (new users, please remember that running RealConfig.bat is always a necessary step, even if you're just upgrading from an earlier release). Finally, launch the game and don't change any of the graphics or video settings by hand. Just evaluate visually, and objectively with my mod's internal fps counter, how the game is working in VR. That will give you a baseline for performance and quality. Example: with a 20xx series GPU and the default graphics settings chosen by RealConfig, at the initial 2432x2432 resolution, you might be seeing good frame rates of 70-80 fps but perhaps the image will look a bit too pixelated for your taste, especially around nearby objects and NPCs. So you might elect to increase resolution, one step at a time, while activating DLSS on Quality or perhaps Balanced, until the image quality looks good enough without losing too much in fluidity.

Whichever road you take, just don't even think of turning on Ray Tracing unless you have an RTX 4090. Any other card will be screaming for mercy, and punishing you with a frame rate in the 20-30s which is completely unacceptable in VR, even with AER.

The video above, and a follow-up at https://youtu.be/yCJD0zQbi4E, will give you plenty of ideas and also show you which other mods Dr Greg found useful to get the best possible experience in VR. He has more than 300 hours in the game, all played in-headset, so listen to what he says and you won't be disappointed!!

Have fun tinkering away, and please make sure to discuss your results here in the comment section. Private messages to me are fine, and I always try to do my best replying to everyone (sorry if I missed your DM though, I get so many!!) but public comments can be useful to all the community and not just the person who asked the question <3

Update 1: It looks like the latest NVIDIA driver has messed up Cyberpunk's world map. Thanks to Patron Hoshi82 (nothing gets past you, my friend!) for letting me know about the issue. The problem is not specific to VR, or to the RTX 4090: it's a driver regression, probably caused by excessively aggressive optimization. The easiest solution for now is rolling back to the previous driver version: https://youtu.be/4GwZb73JKTc
NVIDIA already came out with a hotfix that requires a few manual steps (https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5400/kw/2077) but trying to download it gives me an error, so I couldn't verify it. However, the next driver should integrate the fix.

Update 2: Mr. BLid just published a super-interesting video with his ultimate VR setup for Cyberpunk 2077! You can find it here: https://youtu.be/kYFbqL8USnw
He even went as far as creating his own package of 29 mods on Nexus (link in the video description) which, together with his recommended optimizations and settings, can make even a laptop give you the definitive immersive VR experience. Check it out, it's an awesome guide and it will take you every step of the way from installing the game to flying cars!!

For convenience, I'm including here a few links to the many other CP2077-related posts that I have on this Patreon. In particular, if you find that you can't read the information that the game HUD pushes to the sides of the screen, or it seems that the scanner won't target what you're looking at, please read carefully the last post in the list about the "tilt 'n slide" interaction model.

Index of previous posts:

• new Patrons please see the main CP2077 post for in-depth instructions and lots of details;
• refer to the troubleshooting post if you have problems;
• Pimax users, please read this to find out how to configure the mod for your headset;
• a previous update post explains all you need to know about aiming down sights;
• here's how to make ReShade effects work in VR;
• and how to make cars fly!
• the full list of fixes and improvements in (now obsolete) update 3.2.2 can be found here;
• a video tutorial of my slow-motion feature, and the special 3D menus for character creation and navigating the world map;
• how to use the new custom resolution and target PPD functions (with video);
• how to use the new HUD interaction paradigm (a.k.a. tilt 'n slide, full gameplay demo).