Cyberpunk 2077 AMD FSR 2.0 User Mod Doubles Frame Rates

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Swap some DLSS DLLs for FSR 2.0 files and voilà!

AMD FSR 2.0 upscaling for Cyberpunk 2077
(Image credit: PotatoOfDoom1337)

Modders have found a way to get AMD's latest and greatest upscaling algorithm working in Cyberpunk 2077. A NexusMods contributor called PotatoOfDoom1337 has posted some files and instructions for using AMD FSR 2.0 in the game. Please take note of a warning that the mod is a 'proof of concept,' and testers should expect bugs. Nevertheless, PotatoOfDoom1337 shared some compelling screenshots and performance hike details.

One of the essential pieces of evidence to qualify this mod is the pair of gaming screenshots. The first screenshot shows the game with FSR 2.0 Balanced and all settings on Max; the second screenshot features FSR 1.0 Balanced and all settings on Max. We didn't need to zoom in and rub our chins for a long time to see the difference; AMD FSR 2.0 is immediately more detailed and vivid.

PotatoOfDoom1337 said he ran the game at 4K on his aging GeForce GTX 1080, with FPS doubled to a fair 45 FPS when FSR 2.0 was applied. YouTube channel MxBenchmarkPC has already made a good comparison video.

If you are interested in PotatoOfDoom1337's mod, head over to the project page, download the files, and follow the step-by-step guide to install it. Let us remind you again that this fiddling could break your game install and waste a lot of your time. Also, if you are a regular user of Nvidia DLSS in this game, this mod switches that upscaler out. After installing this mod in the game UI, you will adjust FSR 2.0 settings using the DLSS quality menu.

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AMD FSR 2.0 upscaling for Cyberpunk 2077
(Image credit: PotatoOfDoom1337)

FSR 2.0 Balanced

Cyberpunk 2077 is among the most demanding AAA games and is something of a standard when benchmarking graphics cards. One of the appealing aspects of Cyberpunk 2077 for benchmarking is the game's support for modern graphics technologies like real-time raytracing and current upscaling techs like DLSS and FSR. In addition, the game engine's responsiveness to more powerful CPUs is also appreciable.

Officially Cyberpunk 2077 only currently supports FSR 1.0, so fans of the title are eager to see this upgraded to the more capable and refined FSR 2.0. However, AMD has warned that FSR 2.0 isn't just a drop-in replacement for the prior version, and developers need to spend between three days to four weeks to get this upscaler up and running.

After absorbing the nature of this mod/hack, one can't help but wonder whether a similar bit of file swapping and registry editing could get FSR 2.0 to work in other DLSS supporting titles.

AMD dropped the FSR 2.0 source code earlier this week, with a few barbs cast towards Nvidia DLSS and Intel XeSS. Soon after, GPUOpen announced that FSR 2.0 was on the way to Microsoft's Xbox consoles. AMD FSR 2.0's open nature might be able to help it gain ground against the competition.

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Mark Tyson
Mark Tyson
News Editor

Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.

9 Comments Comment from the forums
  • hannibal
    Well it most likely did TaKe at least couple of days to make this hack. But nice to see DIY fsr solutions!
    Reply
  • -Fran-
    Just like with the AVX fix, it's always random people in the Internet doing the things we want to see fixed or done in modern games, LOL. That speaks a lot about Devs these days.

    Other than that, it's really cool to see FSR2.0 being so easy to implement (or hack) into a game with DLSS2.0 support.

    Regards.
    Reply
  • mamasan2000
    -Fran- said:
    Just like with the AVX fix, it's always random people in the Internet doing the things we want to see fixed or done in modern games, LOL. That speaks a lot about Devs these days.

    Other than that, it's really cool to see FSR2.0 being so easy to implement (or hack) into a game with DLSS2.0 support.

    Regards.

    Devs? I think the decision needs to come from upper management to spend that time and money on implementing it. Unless you expect Devs to spend unpaid time to work on it for 3-30 days for no reason.
    And then it has to be quality-tested and sent to MS and Sony to be approved, which also isn't free.
    Because you wouldn't expect a lower level of quality. Like you do with mods and modders. I mean, if this mod crashes your game, you are probably removing it and moving on with your life. But, if it was official...I bet you would swear to never buy their games again or similar =).
    Btw, who did all the bonuses go to for Cyberpunk? 99% went to upper management. Millions of dollars.
    Reply
  • -Fran-
    mamasan2000 said:
    Devs? I think the decision needs to come from upper management to spend that time and money on implementing it. Unless you expect Devs to spend unpaid time to work on it for 3-30 days for no reason.
    And then it has to be quality-tested and sent to MS and Sony to be approved, which also isn't free.
    Because you wouldn't expect a lower level of quality. Like you do with mods and modders. I mean, if this mod crashes your game, you are probably removing it and moving on with your life. But, if it was official...I bet you would swear to never buy their games again or similar =).
    Btw, who did all the bonuses go to for Cyberpunk? 99% went to upper management. Millions of dollars.
    Ah, I was expecting this reply.

    To what I'll say: no, Devs still have a say in what they work on when it comes to features and such. It's not like Dev studios can't speak their mind and help organize roadmaps. They're not mindless slaves. Granted, FSR may not be an "strategic" thing they want to work on, since AMD probably is not going to give them any money to include it, but you cannot deny it is a very nice to have in a game that struggles with modern hardware to run.

    As for your mods comment. Yes, that is true. A modder doesn't need to pass much scrutiny, but you can believe if the mod breaks the game, it won't be used.

    Regards.
    Reply
  • salgado18
    -Fran- said:
    Just like with the AVX fix, it's always random people in the Internet doing the things we want to see fixed or done in modern games, LOL. That speaks a lot about Devs these days.

    Other than that, it's really cool to see FSR2.0 being so easy to implement (or hack) into a game with DLSS2.0 support.

    Regards.
    This reminds me of the time some user made a GTA V mod that reduced seconds of the loading time because of some giant JSON file. Later on, Rockstar themselves made changes to that JSON to achieve the same effect officially.

    Who knows, maybe it's this that pushes the game to upgrade FSR.
    Reply
  • cryoburner
    mamasan2000 said:
    And then it has to be quality-tested and sent to MS and Sony to be approved, which also isn't free.
    This is a mod for the PC version. And the game's existing DLSS and FSR 1.0 upscaling support is only available on PC, so Microsoft and Sony have nothing to do with that.

    mamasan2000 said:
    Because you wouldn't expect a lower level of quality. Like you do with mods and modders. I mean, if this mod crashes your game, you are probably removing it and moving on with your life. But, if it was official...I bet you would swear to never buy their games again or similar =).
    Cyberpunk 2077 already had a "dumpster fire" level of quality at launch, and while it's been improved somewhat since then, from what I've heard it's still in many ways an unfinished mess a year and a half later. We're talking about a game that Playstation removed from its online storefront for half a year due to how fundamentally broken it was at launch. So, if anyone was going to swear to not buy CD Projekt's games due to the title being buggy or crashing, they most likely did so already.

    And since FSR 2.0 appears to interface with the game's render pipeline similar to DLSS, I suspect it's probably relatively easy for a developer to add support for it to a game that already supports DLSS. They might want to spend some time adjusting the parameters to find an optimal balance of performance to visual quality though, and would most likely roll the feature in with a bunch of other updates.
    Reply
  • cryoburner
    salgado18 said:
    This reminds me of the time some user made a GTA V mod that reduced seconds of the loading time because of some giant JSON file. Later on, Rockstar themselves made changes to that JSON to achieve the same effect officially.
    They didn't just reduce the loading time by seconds. It was more like minutes for the online mode on many systems.

    https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/
    Apparently, the parser was inefficiently reading through the entire 10MB file one character at a time every time a bit of data was read from it, then needlessly reading through the entire contents of the array it was storing that data into, and repeating that process around 63,000 times for each piece of data, resulting in the game needlessly grinding away for minutes just to load a relatively small data file that should have taken seconds. The modder managed to drop load times from 6 minutes down to less than 2 minutes on their system just by inserting a routine that cached the data entries and skipped some unnecessary checks when loading the file.

    Rockstar apparently did pay them a $10,000 bug bounty for the fix. They usually only reserve bounties like that for critical security flaws, but made an exception considering how much of an improvement it made to the game's notoriously long load times.
    Reply
  • mamasan2000
    cryoburner said:
    This is a mod for the PC version. And the game's existing DLSS and FSR 1.0 upscaling support is only available on PC, so Microsoft and Sony have nothing to do with that.

    Cyberpunk 2077 already had a "dumpster fire" level of quality at launch, and while it's been improved somewhat since then, from what I've heard it's still in many ways an unfinished mess a year and a half later. We're talking about a game that Playstation removed from its online storefront for half a year due to how fundamentally broken it was at launch. So, if anyone was going to swear to not buy CD Projekt's games due to the title being buggy or crashing, they most likely did so already.

    And since FSR 2.0 appears to interface with the game's render pipeline similar to DLSS, I suspect it's probably relatively easy for a developer to add support for it to a game that already supports DLSS. They might want to spend some time adjusting the parameters to find an optimal balance of performance to visual quality though, and would most likely roll the feature in with a bunch of other updates.

    First point, FSR2 is coming to Xbox: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/xbox-gets-fsr-2-0I bet Playstation will have it shortly after. Similar hardware, right? And I bet the gamers want it.

    Wasn't there something about if your game already has FSR1, implementing FSR2 is faster. So it could be a quick thing. I certainly wouldn't mind seeing FSR2 in CP2077. I like CP2077. I don't like the state of it. I've had it since release.

    In terms of doubling the FPS as the title of the article states, I see no evidence of that in the Mx-something youtube video. Looks to be the same FPS.
    Reply
  • renz496
    mamasan2000 said:
    First point, FSR2 is coming to Xbox: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/xbox-gets-fsr-2-0I bet Playstation will have it shortly after. Similar hardware, right? And I bet the gamers want it.

    Wasn't there something about if your game already has FSR1, implementing FSR2 is faster. So it could be a quick thing. I certainly wouldn't mind seeing FSR2 in CP2077. I like CP2077. I don't like the state of it. I've had it since release.

    In terms of doubling the FPS as the title of the article states, I see no evidence of that in the Mx-something youtube video. Looks to be the same FPS.

    Gamers want it but some complication might happen with developer or publisher. Also console gamer usually sit much father than pc gamer against the screen. So most often they can get away even with simple graphic quality reduction to increase performance because some details are hard to see when you sit at least a few meters from the TV.

    FSR 2 is faster to implement if the game already have active DLSS implementation. Not FSR 1. That's why you did not see many games that already have FSR 1 not instantly being upgraded to FSR 2.
    Reply