Cyberpunk 2077 video card tests presented: even RTX 3090 and RX 6900 XT failed to provide 60 FPS in 4K
The long-awaited Cyberpunk 2077 is finally out. The developers in the trailers promised a great picture, and the resource Tom’s Hardware decided to find out what video card would be needed to get one. Comprehensive testing of a number of current video cards was carried out, which made it possible to find out what accelerators are actually needed for a comfortable immersion in the world of cyberpunk in certain conditions.
Tom’s Hardware has conducted very large-scale and comprehensive testing, with all the details of which you can find here. We will give you the key points and test results. In short: you will be able to enter the world of cyberpunk even with a not very powerful video card, but the frame rate can vary quite a lot. It depends on the hardware in your system and the graphics settings, of which there are 24 in the game at once.
To begin with, we note that testing was carried out on the release version of the game. The test system consisted of a liquid-cooled Intel Core i9-9900K processor, an MSI MEG Z390 Ace motherboard, Corsair DDR4-3600 CL16 RAM, two 16GB each, and an XPG SX8200 Pro 2TB SSD.
At medium graphics settings without DLSS or FidelityFX at 1080p (1920 × 1080 pixels) all tested video cards coped with the game: the youngest of them, the popular GeForce GTX 1060, provided 36.9 FPS on average (30 FPS is considered the minimum for games), and for a comfortable 60 FPS, a GeForce GTX 1660 Super will be enough. The flagships here are close to 110 FPS.
At a higher resolution of 1440p (2560 × 1440 pixels), a GeForce GTX 1070 was required to cross the 30 FPS threshold, and in 4K resolution (3840 × 2160 pixels), the GeForce RTX 2070 Super coped with this task. It is also interesting that in all resolutions, except 4K, the Radeon RX 6900 XT turned out to be the leader, but in the latter case, it significantly lost to the GeForce RTX 3090.
For maximum graphics settings, the popular GeForce GTX 1060 is no longer enough – it provides less than 25 FPS at 1080p. Comfortable 60 FPS can only be provided by the GeForce RTX 2070 Super (even 69.1 FPS on average). The flagships will provide over 100 FPS.
In 1440p and 4K resolutions with the best graphics settings, the minimum required FPS is able to provide the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and GeForce RTX 3070, respectively. Note that even the flagships of the new generation are not up to 60 FPS in 4K resolution.
Now for ray tracing. Only NVIDIA GeForce RTX video cards were tested with it because Cyberpunk 2077 does not yet support tracing on AMD Radeon accelerators. Also during testing, AI anti-aliasing DLSS was activated.
As a result, the GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 were able to deliver frame rates above 80 and 70 FPS at 1080p and 1440p, respectively. The rest of the video cards also did a good job, providing over 30 FPS. In the case of 4K resolution, last year’s RTX 2070 Super showed only 25.3 FPS, while the oldest GeForce RTX 3090 was able to provide almost 55 FPS.
As an experiment, ray tracing was also launched on a non-intended GeForce GTX 1660 Super. As a result, in 720p resolution (1280 × 720 pixels) with a lower texture rendering quality, the video card was able to deliver 34 FPS.
