By now, we thought we had seen everything we could, good or ill, when it comes to Cyberpunk 2077’s launch performance. But it turns out that there are still secrets to be found in the game’s code. Specifically, a whole new hidden but already built-in ray tracing mode called “Cinematic RTX.”
Cinematic RTX first came to our attention when, earlier today, a new Cyberpunk 2077 mod named “Enable Cinematic_RTX” hit popular game modding site Nexus Mods. Well, it’s less of a mod and more of a series of instructions for enabling something already built into the game. If you’re using the GOG version of the game, all you need to do to enable it is create a shortcut to the game’s .exe file and add the following argument to the end of its target:
-qualityLevel=Cinematic_RTX
This sets the shortcut to launch Cyberpunk 2077 in the game’s pre-existing “Cinematic RTX” mode, which pumps up lighting, ambient occlusion and level of detail at the cost of 2GB extra VRAM usage.
Meanwhile, if you’re playing via Steam, you can activate Cinematic RTX by right clicking on Cyberpunk 2077 in your library, selecting properties, and adding the same line of code in the “launch options” text field.
Once activated, you’ll notice that some shadows become more pronounced while some lighting becomes more realistic, though changes tend to be nuanced. We were already fairly impressed by the game’s max in-game settings when we reviewed it on an RTX 3080 PC, but if you’ve got the extra VRAM, there’s no harm in giving this a shot.
Alternately, the original Nexus Mods poster, andwhat112, also posted a list of other launch parameters you can try for different quality levels, though they didn’t dive too deeply into the specifics of each. They credit the discovery of these parameters to CP77 Modding Discord member SkacikPL.
To access these, just add “-qualityLevel=” to the end of your .exe file or launch options as usual, but instead of “Cinematic_RTX,” type in one of the following:
- Low
- Medium
- High
- Ultra
- RTXMedium
- RTXUltra
- Cinematic
- Cinematic_RTX
- CinematicEXR
- CinematicEXR_RTX
- SafeMode
- Console
- ConsolePro
- ConsoleEarlyNextGen
- ConsoleEarlyNextGenQuality
- GeForceNow
- IconsGeneration
- Auto
Personally, those “Console” setting looks especially enticing to us. Can we finally experience the masterful misfire that is the base PS4/Xbox One Cyberpunk 2077 port on PC? (Answer: No, we cannot. Or at least, using the Console and ConsolePro options didn't appear to change anything compared to our existing settings. YMMV.)
