How to play Cyberpunk 2077 on a Low-End PC.

Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the best looking games currently on the market. Coming out in 2020 the game had heavy performance issues on both consoles and Windows and some high-end hardware still struggles to maintain performance. The game doesn’t come with many options to optimize the game but modders have been working hard and dug up some amazing work. Let’s dig into it right away and get Cyberpunk 2077 to run on a Low-End PC!

Before we start.

The game offers a lot of customizations in the Graphics tab and if the lowest preset didn’t help you, you are in the right place. The game requirements are quite high, and the game struggles to maintain stable performance even on a quad-core CPU paired with 8GB of ram. Before starting read our guide on how to optimize windows for better fps and performance here to get the best results.

If your computer has 4GB Ram or less it would be close to impossible to make the game playable! However, we tried our best to get the game to run at least at 20fps but it comes at a few sacrifices. To get the game to run on an integrated GPU the visuals will need to be lowered significantly which can lead to some weird looking textures and scenes. If you don’t mind them and are a true Low-spec gamer then let’s get into it!

Turning Cyberpunk 2077 into a Low-End PC game

In order to maximize the performance, a lot of visuals will need to be sacrificed and the game might actually look very appealing but as a low-spec gamer this shouldn’t bother you much so let’s make this game run.

Here are the key changes that truly enhance the performance-

• Manually reducing the render resolution or CAS
• Disabling shadows, fog and more affects entirely.

Reduce Render Resolution

The game provides Contrast Adaptative Sharpening(CAS) a feature that allows the GPU to render the game at a lower resolution and upscale the texture later to improve performance without losing a lot of visuals. In simple words it substitutes the internal resolution scaling. By default, the lowest you can go is 50 which can be an appropriate value for some cases. With CAS at 50, the game starts to look a little blurry but massively improves performance the image below illustrates the difference!

If 50 simply isn’t good enough for you we actually have a way to go even lower! In order to access the config file follow the following steps.

• Open the root directory of the game.(Where the game is installed).
• From there head to the following location Cyberpunk 2077\r6\config\settings\platform\pc.
• There open the Options.json file with notepad or any texteditor.
• Hit ctrl+f to bring up the ‘find’ window and search ‘srs’.
• Under the ‘SRS_Resolution’ section find ‘min value’.
• This represents the Min value for CAS.
• Change it to 20 to change the minimum value for CAS to 20.

Now, head into the settings of the game and lower the CAS value. The game will look much worse but will significantly boost your performance as the image-texture resolution has been downscaled to 20%.

Taking it a step further with Manual config file settings

The games config file is located in the following directory Cyberpunk 2077\engine\config\base. Open the general.ini file and add the following commands to it.

VolumetricFog = 0

VolumetricClouds = 0

DistantFog = 0

DistantVolFog = 0

Antialiasing = 0

AntialiasingSuppressed = 1

ScreenSpaceReflection = 0

ScreenSpacePlanarReflection = 0

Bloom = 0

ImageBasedFlares = 0

ChromaticAberration = 0

DepthOfField = 0

SSAO = 0

MotionBlur = 0

DistantShadows = 0

RainMap = 0

LocalShadows = 0

DistantGI = 0

ContactShadows = 0

RuntimeTangentUpdate = 0

DynamicDecals = 0

Hair = 0

CharacterSubsurfaceScattering = 0

CharacterSubsurfaceTranslucency = 0

CharacterRimEnhancement = 0

ScreenSpaceUnderwater = 0

ScreenSpaceHeatHaze = 0

CharacterLightBlockers = 0

Weather = 0

ScreenSpaceRain = 0

CascadesHeuristicForceRefresh = 0

 

The above commands will disable most of the features like motion blur, depth of field, Antialiasing and shadows entirely. If you are desperate enough and want to take things a step further there is actually a way to disable ‘Hair’ entirely in the game. Just add the ‘Hair =0’ command to the general.ini file and it should allow you to run Cyberpunk 2077 on a Low-End PC.

The above settings funnily turn the game into a pixelated PS1 game but if you are a true low-spec gamer and don’t mind the shadow-less city the game might be playable for you. The settings above are quite self-explanatory you can try different values and settings in order to balance the performance and quality. We low spec gamers are willing to sacrifice all sorts of visual appeal in order to hit that playable fps mark.

If even after these customizations the game is not playable, read our list about some of the best games you can play on a Low-End PC here.