As explained in the game review, Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty elevates the base game in all respects and nowhere is that more apparent than the technical side, which is this article's focus.
Cyberpunk 2077 was already the best poster card for ray tracing when it launched in December 2020, featuring ray-traced lighting, reflections, and shadows. It also ran well on PC hardware, especially on GeForce RTX cards, thanks to RT cores used for ray tracing and Tensor Cores used for NVIDIA DLSS.
Over time, CD Projekt RED continued to evolve the technical feature set of Cyberpunk 2077 alongside NVIDIA. The game received DLSS 3 (Frame Generation) support in late January 2023, greatly boosting frame rates for GeForce RTX 40 GPU owners and paving the way for the Path Tracing preview, also known as RT Overdrive Mode.
When the Path Tracing preview update was introduced in April, Cyberpunk 2077 became the first modern triple-A game to leave rasterization behind in nearly all regards, and the game easily regained the crown of the best-looking game while also delivering solid performance on RTX 40 GPUs. When I interviewed CD PROJEKT RED's Global Art Director Jakub Knapik, I was told further improvements to the preview would be coming later, including support for the RTX 40's Opacity Micromaps ray tracing optimization feature.
CDPR hasn't clarified whether that is already available in Phantom Liberty. However, this expansion (or rather, the free 2.0 update that goes with it) does introduce a major new feature: support for NVIDIA's DLSS 3.5. Once again, Cyberpunk 2077 is the first game to adopt the new feature, and it's a win-win situation.
For the benefit of clarity, let's abandon NVIDIA's confusing naming scheme for a moment. DLSS 3.5 is actually a specific feature called Ray Reconstruction which is available to all RTX owners (20 and 30 Series included) as a separate setting in the game's menu.
With Ray Reconstruction, NVIDIA takes advantage of the power of AI to improve the quality of ray traced denoising when upscaling with DLSS. Just take a look at the reflections below; Ray Reconstruction keeps them incredibly sharp even when upscaling from 1080p to 4K (DLSS Performance), whereas the second picture with Ray Reconstruction off is markedly blurrier.
The benefits of DLSS 3.5 (Ray Reconstruction) are more easily spotted when comparing reflections. However, the keenest observers will also notice that the path traced lighting is also much sharper with Ray Reconstruction, providing a higher fidelity image. In this game, DLSS 3.5 also runs a bit faster as it replaces several denoisers with a single one, though Ray Reconstruction generally won't affect performance much either way.
Overall, Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty's Dogtown environment is a bit heavier than the base game, as evidenced by the updated system requirements and by the fact that it's being released only for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S|X consoles, leaving the old ones behind for good.
The game's performance figures vary a lot depending on the area, the amount of lights, reflections, NPCs, and so on, making it hard to pin down an average frame rate that you can expect to find throughout the whole experience. Some areas are completely smooth, while others can be more taxing. In my experience, the worst slowdowns happen when driving at high speed in a dense urban area, which is to be expected in an open world game.
Still, Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty runs fairly smoothly when taking into account the incredibly advanced technical features that have been implemented in the game. Here's the result of my random open world gameplay captured with CapFrameX.
It stutters much less than so many games offering markedly inferior visuals, that's for sure, never impairing gameplay in any way. And it's an absolute glory to behold, with path tracing lending a photorealistic look at Night City simply by virtue of making sure all of its lights properly affect every surrounding surface.
If you've got a High Dynamic Range (HDR) display with high nits capabilities like my Samsung S95B QD-OLED, the thousand neon lights of Night City shine brighter than ever. Yes, the black levels are still elevated (and the mod fix doesn't work yet with this version of Cyberpunk 2077), but it's nonetheless worth forgetting about that to bask in the peerless lighting.
Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty couldn't be a better swansong for the RED Engine. The question is whether CD Projekt RED can replicate this quality and performance with Unreal Engine 5, the engine of choice for the studio's future projects, including the new The Witcher trilogy and the Cyberpunk 2077 sequel currently codenamed Project Orion.
Unreal Engine 5 can undoubtedly offer better-looking NPCs thanks to its MetaHuman tool, but its path tracing isn't meant to be used for real-time yet, and the performance of the first UE5 games leaves a lot to be desired. Here's hoping CD Projekt RED can work with Epic to optimize the engine so that its future games can still be considered technical benchmarks.
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