"Photorealistic" Cyberpunk but I don’t have a 4090… 

thanks for being a youtuber who ACTUALLY posts the mods used in the description

Pro tip: enabling the "Global Illumination range" setting (Cyberpunk 2077 6\config\settings\platform\pc) in the game's options.json so that it shows up in the game's graphics settings menu and setting it to Ultra (the game defaults to High) improves the quality of the rasterized lighting and reduces it's noise at pretty much no performance cost

I can already feel my GTX 1050ti has set itself on fire, trying to run this

The issue I see here is that gaming raytracing is often exaggerated for artistic purposes. The vast majority of textures from how games display things are too shiny and glossy than their real life counterparts. A lot of modern games also use visual trickery to emulate things like chromatic aberration, which is a camera issue unrelated to our vision. Then it begs the question, do you want photorealistic graphics as seen through a camera or realistic like your eyes see it?

With all the talk about 8 GB of Vram not being enough for todays games and heavily modded games, This being a 3050 with 8 Gigs pulling this off is impressive. Nice video man.

it's still impressive how good it can look even without rt and path tracing. nova lut is awesome

2:03 is trippy as hell

It's interesting how closely these modding developments for CP2077 has mirrored what happened with Skyrim and Fallout 4 in their hayday. Especially in respect to weather, water, and lighting mods - even ENBs.

Great video bro and great results. 'A computer straight out of NASA' is very true, not everyone has at least $5k to spend on a computer. Subbed.

leave it to the brit to make the game more grey 🤣 really tho this is a great video to show just how much you can change a game for the better by just tweaking the visuals. a lot of these mods arent really performance hungry, usually just VRAM hungry at most. surprisingly low end systems can do some awesome stuff without sacrificing all that much performance.

Nice little video to drink my coffee to before heading to work. Been watching since you had below 75k subs, I love the vids keep it up :)

I am actually Impressed mate, I dont say this often either. I think im going to have to try this on my rigs and test things out for myself. Thanks for showing us this. Cheers.

It's good to see an entry-level GPU running Cyberpunk well with mods. Oh boy. Down the rabbit hole of mods we go! Remember Skyrim and running it with 50+ mods? Great video...

I’ve tried all of his LUTs; Pure, Vibrant and HDR and gotta say the HDR one with decent tuning looks the best to me! Cheers Steve ✌️💯

Thank you, that was exactly was i was looking for for my r7-5800x+rx6750xt build to replay this game! So i'm super grateful about this mods demonstration :)

Awesome vid! Great showcase of the mods and their performance impact. The look is interesting, though you can certainly tell that the NPCs and large buildings were not designed to be looked at so directly lol

I actually prefer this over the normal graphics honestly, this looks better to me. It reminds me of Half-Life Alyx

In my current playthrough, I started walking to quest markers that are within 1Km with the specific goal of taking in the world and enjoying it properly because I've noticed I didn't really take the game in, before. Pretty much worth it if you dig the game's art style. Guess this playthrough just got another notch more interesting, too!

I remember seeing the GTA5 hyper realistic textures and being blown away as to how amazing it looked. Suppose it was only a matter of time before Cyberpunk would attempt something similar. Look great, thanks for sharing :-)

Great video choom

Neat! Just needs dlssg-to-fsr3 mod on top to enable FrameGen on any RTX card, not just the 4000 series.

Nice and clear. Straight to the point . Cheers

this is great! I'm always afraid of running mods because i know i'll break something.... but this has made these things look cool and seem attainable.

2:04 i think a color palette like this is what i was mssing in CP2077, there was never a moment where i thought "this looks like it could be on earth" because the standard palette is just crazy and too much black/dark grey and weird color tones are used.

I’m going to try this out this weekend. I have a 4070ti super and I didn’t particularly like the look of it in vanilla form with ray tracing/path tracing. But I really like the look of yours. I’ll give it a try as I’ve never modded Cyberpunk before.

As much as i enjoy looking at people make wonderful mods that make games look lifelike. I also feel that making a game look more "realistic" reduces the art direction impact of that game.

realistic lighting, weather and environment, but the npc animation though...😅

Looks Great, and Modding can be a chore, hope you get some return for your time and enjoyment in cyberpunk :D

Thank you for the video! I am planning to do a heavily modded playthrough of Cyberpunk (again) but I am waiting for FSR 3.1 to be implemented before I go for it :) I have an RX 6600. Wait, you are using an rtx 3050 wow. Thank you for not using a 4070 or a card like that. Really helps us lower end gpu users

Fun content, keep going! :)

Interesting video, Steve :D

It's amazing how far the game as come from all the bad publicity it had at launch. The devs stuck at it and fixed the game, and released a killer DLC. The modding community was always very active and really enhanced the game, I used the 3rd person mod a lot which makes the whole game a lot more immersive. It's a real passion project that there are all these great mods out there, and this is far and away the best looking game of the modern era.

I hate it when you find a cool mod and want to install it but it needs like ten other mods as a requirement to function

A thanks for sharing this. I also like to see how far I can push my medium spec machine in terms of graphics.

Mods are an absolute must use in cyberpunk.

I've been playing with Nova Lut Pure and it's a good alternative if you want colours to pop more and an overall less washed-out look.

Using these mods plus reshade and simply using the ambient light and filmic tonemap shaders, tuning them a lil bit gives a 85-90 percent accurate pathtracing image on raster rendering for -1 or 2 fps

DF has shown the 3050 running path tracing at 1080p 30fps with dlss set to performance. They also made use of a mod that makes the path tracing bounce rays once rather than twice. This did mean a minor visual sacrifice in some reflections, but performance was genuinely impressive. Of course, while doable, you'd have to lock the framerate to 30 for the best experience. I'd use rtss for that. In fact, I use it a lot when playing games on my main pc with intel hd 630. I've been playing throughout many of the early Assassin's Creed games with a 30fps lock and a controller, and it was a great experience. So far I'm playing AC3 and I just finished the starting Haytham section. Now Connor is a teenager and he knows how to climb trees. Keyboard and mouse play is definitely possible, but the Ezio games have some horrible forced mouse acceleration intense enough to allow me to spin several times around Ezio and give him motion sickness. And even if 3 doesn't have acceleration as intense and is therefore much more playable, I like being able to step back and play on a controller. This is especially great on a 1080p 39" TV. Works like a charm at 540p on the hd 630, but sometimes one of the cpu cores is pushed too hard and I get framedrops because of that. Not the best port. Here's me hoping Black Flag is better in that regard.

Honestly, when I've seen these mods I expected significant performance drop. Props to you and the modders! I think I would try to play Cyberpunk later with my 6750xt for WQHD again. Maybe even I'll fetch some mods to improve LODs and models of food/etc as those are.. Been not good, honestly. Rt is out of question for me, ofc 😂

Ultra Plus mod helps with the FPS while offering more options for RT and PT!

It looks amazing

I install the Ultra plus better path tracing and stutter hotfix - on the performance PT preset, it adds a lot of FPS and it is AMAZING! And the de-noising stuff here are just better looking than vanilla in every way! And I also add the dlss to fsr 3 mod - this makes it incredibly smooth! And with these I can have smooth 60 FPS on my 3060 with full Path tracing and it looks better than vanilla. I also love the Nova LUT Pure, and I combine it with Nova ENV Raster for the less fog and less dark shadows. I have no performance loss when adding any LUT or ENV. It's just like color palette and lighting settings, it's not like it's modding anything that heavy.

Hey, do you think 4070 Ti will do very simillar to those 4090 Photorealistic Cyberpunk videos in 1080p 60 FPS at least? I would LOVE to try it out myself since I'm just about to upgrade from GTX 1050 2 GB to 4070 Ti because I found it at the same price as a 4070 Super.

Good callout on overcast weather being used for realism videos. Cyberpunk's color grading is stylized, the mods do make it more realistic but less atmospheric.

Massively impressive

I don’t love the drowned out color look but sometimes it’s cool. Thx for the list

Already running this on 3060 ti using nova lut + photorealistic reshade. FSR 3 mod that support non rtx 40 series also help (frame generation), constantly get 100+ FPS ultra setting without Ray Tracing with DLSS Quality.

After watching this, no matter what everybody says I still love my 3050.❤ Amazing video ❤

The only RT option that makes a difference that isn't too subtle to be readily apparent is RT Reflections, honestly I think just RT Reflections and no resolution scaling looks better than any other RT configuration with resolution scaling if you play at ultrawide or 4k.

Do you think you can do some VR videos? Especially with Cyberpunk.

It reminds me of a stop motion TV show that has amazingly detailed models. Like 21st century Captain Scarlett.

it got me. the thumbnail looks like a photo of a city from my country. nice mods indeed without fps penalty.

its so nice that its possible to play at max settings with path tracing using an rtx4060 with 60fps+ (1080P) because of DLSS and Frame Gen

Nice. Always looking for a reason to play this game for the 100th time.

I would love to see the RTX 3050 used with the FSR 3 mod on Cyberpunk.

The problem with the LUT and colour grading is that it makes everything gray & white overtone. It loses the vibrancy of night city and becomes dreary and drab.

In my case I was impressed by the 4060 trying these mods, but pairing it with my already 8 years old i5 wasn't the best idea, as the framerate dips everytime I move the camera, tho I couldn't do much anyway because I only had enough for the GPU

Playing this with the FSR 3 frame gen mod on my OC 5700xt and it’s great

Some other recommendations: In place of that horrible paid-for DOF, I would download reshade instead and use "Tilt Shift." It's a static peripheral blur instead of true DOF, but it doesn't make you feel like your character needs glasses. Also if you don't have a 4090, but have something up there (I'm using a 4080S) and want to use path tracing, downloading Cyberpunk Ultra Plus is a must. Boosts PT performance. I'm okay with 35-40 fps (as opposed to 20 or something) for the fidelity it adds. Using Intel Super Sampling also gives sharper reflections over DLSS when using Path Tracing.

I genuinely gasped and exclaimed,"WTF?!?" when you revealed that you used a 3050 for this. By the way, what resolution were you running the game at? I am guessing 1080p but if its 1440p, then I might get myself a 4060 and test this out haha. Cheers!

I tried path tracing on my 1650, the in game smoke effects are so realistic I can literally smell them

the framegen mod would benefit greatly for cases like these (or in general) where the user has an underpowered card but want their game to look nice

>path tracing looks fantastic >giant ghosting trail and blur smears on car and puddles

The irony is, a lot of the realism also comes from high contrast, which is something people always avoid/tone down when playing games. It's just easier on the eyes with lower contrast and it's easier to see things. You can use realistic ReShade settings and experience it for yourself. So coupled with monitors not using light the way light behaves in nature, realistic graphics look great but nobody ends up using them.

it looks nice. modern engines already looks good without raytracing its more important to tweak the lighting and colors to match the results you want and this video shows it

Not bad! RT Ultra in combination with these mods looks strikingly realistic at times.

does this also work with an rx 6900 xt? I ask because the ray tracing performance isn't that good. Which Nvidia graphics card can you compare the 6900xt with in terms of ray tracing?

in all this pursuit of more and more computationally expensive and technically more realistically rendered lighting, no dev (or at least a significantly large one) stopped and thought to ask, does real life actually look that reflective and glary? Most of the time its kind of drab, dull, or the sun is up and im on fire and blind

Preem Water and Preem LUT are must-haves for me now, gets rid of the yellow smoggy coloring in the city. I love all of TheCyanideX's mods, they are pretty genius. Load Begone, Trash Begone, Preem Hair, Preem Beards...

I've always wanted to see how Cyberpunk looks in the rain, problem is I've been playing it for a few weeks and it hasn't rained once 😞

The thumbnail broke my brain

thats looks ace 🙂

Just from stylization alone, it looks insanely better.

I wonder if there's a mod for cel-shading so that you can get an 'Edgerunner' anime vibe.. I'm about to look that up..

Fantastic 🎉

G'day Random, I do like what you did here, the original does look to "Over the Top RGB" to me where as for me too this does look more natural 🤔Just wondering if you still have an RX6600 to do a comparison against the RTX3050 as down here they are both currently $309AUD

If mods make RT effect without the drop in performance means games have not change and still producing unoptimized because of companies shortcut via new tech rather than actually make the effects more as default rather than enhanced by RT, cheaper to ask programmers to utilize RT rather than pay Designers to make the actual high graphics

It does look good, will try it on my RX 6600

should do more of these with different games 👍

Nice video.

The issue is with the likes of Novalut (and other LUTs), along with the vast majority of graphical mods in general for Cyberpunk is that there's absolutely no reason for the mods to exist, they're a bit dishonest. LUTs can just be applied to a reshade preset which allows you to toggle on the fly, and more in-depth visuals such as fog, shadows, cascades, volumetrics, ray tracing optimisation, etc. can be done with a fairly simple user.ini.

I've got a RTX 3080 12GB . downloaded a reshade and 2K mods . I have around 80 fps but as soon I turn on tracing it drops down to 20 - 30 fps in town center .. and also in dogtown . max res and all settings max but the tracing is a killer

Reminds me of when I tried Cyberpunk with Psycho RT on a 3080 I briefly had for mining purposes. You could crank everything to the max but you aren't getting high framerates and I don't expect that to change, given how lazy game devs have gotten. But you can totally do photorealistic these days. If Rockstar is being honest about the GTAVI trailer being actual in game rendered footage, then that will become the norm in the next few years. There really isn't much point going over 4k because the average human eye will see little to no difference between 4k and 8k. It is sort of like how there is no point playing games at 300FPS because you can't see that fast anyway. Also, if we break down the term 'photorealistic', that would mean 'like a (analog) photograph', which is roughly equivalent to 4k unless you have some very expensive film and camera. As for the results here, well, I've never seen a saguaro cactus look so good in a video game. Nevermind the fact they are being depicted somewhere that is 300 mi from their rather limited natural range. Even with climate change and deliberate planting (which I doubt would have happened in the Cyberpunk universe), there wouldn't be this many of them just a couple decades after a global war and they wouldn't be as big. They also didn't do enough iterations of them to make it not seem repetitive. At 4:41, we see two identical saguaros within just a few feet of each other. The one in the right foreground. That cactus would be about a century old. Need a procedurally drawn cactus which really isn't difficult these days, it is just that CDPR sucks.

your giving me an idea for my indie game...

Omg,so much ghosting trails back to NPC steps

color grading can make a world of difference when it comes to visuals

2:56 oh man bladerunner 2049 vibes right here. or should i say bladerunner 2077 haha...

@00:40 the irony here is that NASA probably would lend one of their old 1980-90s pieces of tech! 😂

Having 4 GB 3050-laptop gpu is a very limiting factor for me :/ But at least I can play the game on high-ultra settings (no RT) with dynamic resolution dlss (55-85%) at 1080p locked 40 fps most of the time.

Have you installed any mods to get rid of the vignette in Cyberpunk ?

Much, much better than the ridiculous overblown vanilla lighting

any 3080 users here. I'm sort of testing my card using all of these mods with path tracing and rt on psycho . dlss on quality . all settings maxed(ssr psycho) i get about 50 in city and 80 out of city (harbor) is this good?

So what card would you need to get 60 fps instead of 30 fps?

preem vid choom

What processor have you paired with the GPU for these tests?

Where can i find the installation guides for the mods?

Yup Overdrive is just a gimmick! You can do this with LUTS

I never liked the look of outdoor environments in this game, even at maxed out settings. They never looked bad of course but something always felt off. Indoor environments look incredible though. Cool that there are mods that make outdoors more to my taste.

I'm not lucky to have a 3050 but we are lucky for this guy makes the 3050 worth playing.

Thanks for this! I personaly own RTX 3050 and running just high preset for at least 70 fps +- 10 fps