 Hello, do you realize your arm is in the pavement, sir? This is a good looking game. Wow, this is the lighting without RTX? You are not playing this game with ray tracing on and DLSS disabled. It's finally actually coming out guys. We've got it, Cyberpunk 2077. And of course we've got the answer to the question you guys all want to know. How does it look running on the absolute maximum balls to the wall hardware at 4K or for extra credit at 8K on the world's best TV, the LG Z10 88 inch OLED. Let's find out shall we ladies and gentlemen? And this video is brought to you by Origin PC who sent over the hardware that we're gonna be using for our experience today. Origin PC ladies and gentlemen, they don't do everything necessarily right. But boy, do they ever have the best shipping materials cause this thing is gonna fricking work no matter what I do to it. Here we go boys. Ah, look I'm in a hurry. We got a game to play. Let's go. You wouldn't know it from what I did to the packing materials. Don't worry though, Origins packing materials top notch. But this is a very special PC. It's an Accorsair 4000D, but this is what they're calling a resto mod version. So they've done a custom graphic for it that sort of hearkens back to a simpler time. Back when new DuckTales episodes were still airing and the front of computers were still working and the front of computers looked a little something like this. Like that compact this logo right there. Get that floppy drive. And for the color, they've gone with a classic beige because those were the days when, you know, it was less about flash and more about, well, they weren't fast either. So it was about something. Anyway, in true resto mod style, naturally, even though they've gone after the aesthetic of an older PC, the insides of this thing are absolutely packed to the gills with the latest gaming hardware. Yes, my friends, it is liquid cooled. It is packing an RTX 3080. It's got a 4K capture card and a 5950X 16 core processor. So no matter how hungry Cyberpunk 2077 is, we are going to be absolutely chewing through it. One minor inconvenience is that because I did wanna run it at 8K as well, I might have to figure out how to get an RTX 3090 out here at some point. Let's fire it up. Oh, wow. That is very RGB, which is definitely different when you consider the retro theme. I guess that's kind of the point though, right? Oh man, yeah, we're really not hiding what's actually under the hood of the engine in this particular resto mod, eh? So they're only making 50 of these, and once they're gone, they are gone. Actually, one more thing. We need to fire this up, get the launcher installed and... Okay, that's cute. We've got the real player icon, got the network neighborhood up in here. All right, that's adorable. Thank you, Origin PC. That's it, game's downloading. All I gotta do now is catch some Zs on my CPU pillow, lttstore.com. See you guys in a bit. Wake up, samurai, we've got a game to play. Sorry. Film the video, dude. In all seriousness though, guys, it is, I forgot to put on my watch. I'm so out of it. It's five in the morning. Colton, Jono and David got our early access copy of the game all sorted out this morning, and we are ready to play Cyberpunk 2077. It's running at 380 frames per second in the menu. So let's see how the game runs. Do you guys wanna go straight to high or should we start at like medium? Medium. Okay, we'll start at medium. Now we are aware that there could be some performance irregularities in our version of the game. This is the early access beta DRM protected version of the game. We didn't get any clarification as to what exactly DRM protected means. We turned on shadow play recording. It's recording the game. I wanna play this game HDR. We're gonna play on like the best TV in the market. We're gonna play with some HDR, ladies and gentlemen. What are we running at? So one thing we changed, field of view, we changed it to 90. By default, it's like 75 or something. Change it to 90. Medium, yeah, yeah, lens flare, motion blur. I changed that to off. By default, I think it was on low. Medium, there we go. Okay, medium preset. Wow. Medium has a lot of like low stuff and ray tracing's off on medium for sure styles. So just click continue. Where's it gonna drop me? You guys- Continue, bro. Continue. Wow, this is the lighting without RTX? That's kind of impressive already right out of the gate. What kind of quality are we looking at for these passersby? Well, dang. This looks pretty darn good for medium, don't it? I mean, I've seen some speculation that CD Projekt Red is like delaying the console release by a few hours because they're like worried it's not gonna look good or whatever. Based on how good this is running on like very, very nice looking, even if they're medium settings. I am less worried. This is like a locked 60 FPS pretty much. I might be a little more nervous than I was before because this is medium settings on an RTX 3080. All right, that's fair. You guys wanna try out DLSS first? Look at this shiny shirt. How stylish is this guy? Hold on, I wanna talk to the camera. So this is not benchmarking. I just wanna know how it runs with DLSS, that's all. So quality. So this should render internally at 1440p if I recall correctly. Okay, well that was a quick and easy 30% performance gain, ish, approximately. I mean, that's, man. DLSS is sweet. That is noticeably smoother in terms of the actual gameplay experience. This is a good looking game. Honestly, there's places where I can kinda tell. Like Tom's diner, the sign there. Actually, I can't tell if that's just like kind of like a heat distortion effect. Oh my God. I think the reason it's ripply is just because of like the heat distortion of the HVAC of the diner, like, that's pretty cool. If we didn't get a 30% FPS improvement, I would think DLSS is not freaking working. Cause we dropped to 53 here, which is not benchmarking, just talking about the experience. Here's a difference I can see that I'm expecting high details to kind of smooth out for me. Like look how bad this guy on the stairs looks. Those are some like 2005 textures right there. But the world is so populous. I understand why they have to do that. I think that's something that's gonna push the card higher as we push detail levels up. So what changes from medium to high? We get film grain, low motion blur, depth of field, lens flare. What else changes here? Shadow mesh quality. So let's have a look. Screen space reflections. I wanna see what our draw distance is looking like. Level of detail goes to high. I'm expecting that to change things like the quality of the crowd around me. So shadows are something that mostly stays at medium. I mean, given how good the lighting looked, even at medium, bearing in mind again, that this is the early access DRM version, whatever that means. Change to high, that cost us about 20, 25% of our performance there, like 43, 45 FPS. Yeah, that is markedly better. You can tell that they're expending a lot of performance, improving the quality of the crowd. Look at this. This is without real-time ray tracing. Like, look at the quality of these reflections. And it's not like in like a need for speed underground, like the whole world is shiny kind of way. Like this is actually reasonable. Okay. Now, can DLSS save this? Can we play on high? I'm sticking with quality. So there's a lesser performance improvement, but we expect it to look very similar to native rendering with the quality DLSS setting. Look how much better the crowd looks. And to me, like in a game like this, that is so much of the atmosphere and so much of the immersion, that when I see people's like clothing texture quality, dynamically changing as they're walking towards me on even like a small street like this, it's pretty jarring. Whereas this is not nearly as noticeable. Like you could see here, let's watch this guy with the purple shiny pants there. That's the flip over point right there. That's where the asset quality changed. That's pretty good. By the time someone's that far away, like it's almost unnatural for them to look that sharp anyway. You could guarantee they spent a ton of time tuning that, hey? Like here, this lady with the backpack. Right there. You can see it. And we're still, like even in a crowded area like this, we're still running above 60 FPS. I mean, of course it's RTX 3080. Oh, they have different settings for ray tracing. So, okay, what does ultra look like? Okay, ultra cranks everything except ray tracing. And then if we set it to ray tracing medium, oh, it keeps everything on ultra and then just sets ray tracing medium. I would have thought it would compensate by turning down some other things and turning up ray tracing. I think a lot of people are gonna turn on that ray tracing medium preset, thinking it means medium graphical fidelity, but ray tracing on. And that is not what that is. Okay, this is gonna, no, it's not. This is gonna be the processor wrecker. Okay, are people fighting? Is that gunfire? It's like a fucking motorcycle. Are you sure? Oh! What? What the fuck? What? Uh, sir? Oh my God. Sir? Oh my God. Sir, are you okay, sir? Now, you know, I'm really interested in this can because I actually think that as it was rolling around on the red surface, that was part of why it kinda seemed like we couldn't see it. And I do wonder if ray tracing is going to make that lighting a little bit more realistic. You see how the bottom of the can is just, yeah. So, okay, hold on. I got, before that can stops rolling, I wanna turn ray tracing on and see what happens. What? Okay, so it's still the same behavior, which is interesting. So that means either ray traced lighting in this game is not that expensive, or it means that whatever it's doing when it's not ray tracing is really expensive. And when I say expensive, I mean in terms of GPU compute requirements. Okay, hold on. I don't wanna experience that too much yet. I wanna focus on looking at ultra. Oh man, now I'm getting distracted cause this is fascinating. Our frame rate went down. Ray tracing may be more effective than whatever other method of global illumination they are using for this game. Well here, we can easily flip between it. I love how quickly this game allows you to tune your settings. I mean, that is a big game changer in terms of the actual experience of getting the game locked in, getting jumped into the game, the fact that you're not going out and restarting it constantly and like, oh, okay, is it running okay now? Wow, yeah. I mean, I'm sure there's more, I'm sure it's like better, but do you see it? No, I can't point out what it is. If we put them side by side, I'm sure we could be, oh yeah, yes, I can tell from the pixels, but high looks really good. There you go. That's the Linus Tech Tips recommendation. If you've got the horses, high with quality DLSS is like what you wanna run at if you're running on RTX 3080 or probably realistically a 3070 at that point. Okay, well, that's what I wanna figure out next is, okay, now what happens if we start playing around with ray tracing? That's it. That's the money right there. Game like this that's more environment, story-driven, 60, 80 FPS, that is lots. Ray tracing, oh, there, okay. I don't think our ray tracing setting was working before. This is very different. Okay, I don't think this is right. No, it wouldn't be this bad. Okay, just a second here. Okay, let's just go to ultra again and see what happens. Okay, there we go. All right, now settings, ray tracing medium. Wait, so is that what happened? Is we didn't realize that DLSS was turning on before? Did it just like glitch out hard there? I think we didn't realize. So you, I mean, unless something dramatic changes between now and I don't know what time it is, but like 10 hours from now, you are not playing this game with ray tracing on and DLSS disabled. That is not happening. Wow, okay. Now, what if I set it to quality instead of auto? Oh, wow. So DLSS is working real hard when you've got ray tracing on like you are rendering at probably 1080p at best. Oh, I see. And you know what? Hold on a second. So look at just the hood of the car as we rotate around it. So you see a little bit of noise in it, right? That's a characteristic of upscaling that you just, you can't really get around. You see just like a little bit of noise in the rear hood or trunk, whatever you wanna call it, the boot. Okay, now let's go ahead and change to auto. And then I expect that you're gonna see that get quite a bit worse. Yep, there it is. You see all that noise? It's still, okay. When you're not focused on an object, it's not bad, but it's way more noticeable. You can see it in that railing. Like you can kind of see it. It's like there's like a noise filter over everything. And that's not the film grain effect, it's different. It's more noticeable in areas where there's more light, which is again, normal when it comes to image noise. Yeah, it's noticeable. I mean, obviously we didn't notice it before when we were looking at that can rolling down the street. Oh, that explains why the performance improves too, David. Yeah, that does make sense. So let's figure out, so we're running around 50, 55 FPS right now. So let's go ahead and not set it to auto. So I'm willing to bet we're running on performance or ultra performance right now. Performance, yep. You know what, I'm not sure. I think it might still be 1080, but just with more approximations. Ultra performance. That is very noticeable. Yeah, the road looks absolutely disgusting at the edges of the frame. So this, you're probably right. This probably is like 720p upscaled. Or like maybe it's rendering parts of the scene at higher. Ah yeah, no, the car looks really nasty too. Just everything looks pretty nasty, especially towards the edges of the frame. Yeah, that's nasty-tastic. The good news is that leaving it on auto is probably just kind of your best bet. Okay, here's some really interesting shadows. Let's flip it back to quality. Let's flip it back to high. Do I have to change the DLS? No, okay. Wait, did that even change? Yep. Okay, all right, you can really see in the shadows of the stairs, those look like garbage town compared to the ray traced shadows. Okay, yeah, I can see it for sure. Look at that. Okay, man, which one would you play on though? Look at this green car on the side. Do you see the green car right there? Okay, let's flip back to high. Man, what's more important to you, sharpness or, I mean, those shadows really do look like just a smudgy, blurry mess compared to that. Okay, part of my problem too with RTX is like, do you see how it was kind of felt like there was too much bloom as I was coming out of that tunnel? Like I get it, it's supposed to kind of mimic the effect of stepping out into a bright area, but it doesn't. Cause it's not, when I like drive through a tunnel, my eyes do not adjust to it, you know? This works like aperture on a camera, not like my eyes. Cause I'm in my car, like looking ahead to the road. I'm not like staring at the dark wall of the inside of the tunnel for hours on end. That's something that I kind of struggle with. I find a little bit immersion breaking about most RTX implementations that I've seen. See that actually looks more realistic to me. Oh, no, it doesn't. That's really awful too. But this area closer to us is fine. So you see that? Get out of my way. They've done a good job, if nothing else, of mimicking the way that like real time ray tracing, global illumination works with their regular non ray traced global illumination. The quality is clearly lower in cases like those stairs, but I'd say they're both good. And this one comes down to personal preference. Do you want that like incredible fidelity in the shadows or do you want that incredible fidelity in the game world? Something we haven't talked about much is how the lower fidelity, the original graphical asset is, the worst it's going to look with deep learning super sampling, right? Garbage in, garbage out. So you look at the road right next to the car, not bad. You look at the car itself, okay, yeah, you've got that kind of that grainy effect on it. Not bad though. But look at that road way out in front of us through the tunnel. It's not good. Whereas if we flip back to high, yeah, big difference. Okay, wait, I wanna see this. I wanna see this ray traced. Look at all the candles and stuff. No, maybe ray tracing is the answer, David. Look at the, look at just the immersiveness of this environment with all these different colors of light, like these candles. Does that not look freaking incredible? Oh, I don't know. What's the right answer? And then, okay, we're gonna go back. We could go all the way to ultra without ray tracing. And it just, it looks fake. It looks flat. It looks like a video game again. And it's subtle, like, but it's really real. Okay, I wanna see ultra now. You know, the difference between medium and ultra is like. Yeah, it's really not that noticeable to me. Cause the lighting is what really gives the scene depth. Environments like this with ray tracing on really does. Like just the way his clothing moves and his head moves like, oh, oh! Do you see his arm when he reached up, David? And I'm sitting so close to this. That's another thing to consider, guys, is we are quite literally blown up right now. Like, if I'm on a monitor, if I'm on a monitor, I'm like, I'm at like this distance. And that difference in sharpness, not that noticeable from here. Okay, you ready for 8K then? Yeah! All right, this was good enough, like dark scene. Okay, yeah, I think so too. Man, all right, okay. RTX 3090 time. Or I don't know. Do you wanna try 8K with the 3080? All right, we just had to change over to 8K mode on our HDMI port. Wow, that is really broken. I can't tell what it looks like is changing in that horizontal divide. Both of them look right, but different. Do you know what I mean? The top half of the screen is missing particles. And I can't tell if like chromatic aberration, no, yeah, chromatic aberration goes through the barrier. Okay, okay. Well, let's just try changing some graphical settings and see. Oh, this is very annoying. Okay, so if we go to 4K, we can figure out what we're running at. So what did we decide? Ray tracing medium was our target, David? So let's do that. Then we'll go to 8K. Wow. This does not look great. When your graphics card is at the very limit of what it can handle, turning on something like shadow play can impact performance very significantly, even if it doesn't under normal circumstances. So I'm gonna turn that back off. Okay, back to the human eye. The thing about the resolution of the human eye is that resolution doesn't mean how many dots per a given area. That's how we define resolution in terms of screens. The resolution of the human eye is the detail it can resolve, resolution. And objects in motion have sort of different resolution characteristics than static objects. So if we're looking at this at 15 FPS, 8K or whatever, and we just look at some high res assets on a static wall or something like that. Here, let's go back in here, okay? That looks flippin' awesome. But the problem is that as soon as anything's in motion, the way that our eye perceives the resolution of the image, the detail of the image, is very poor. So you need a combination of high frame rate and high detail. And at 8K, this just, well, I mean, come on. I don't think I need to tell you guys. This ain't cuttin' it. That looks horrible, right? That's not, there's no resolution left anymore when the frame rate is so low. Rock on, we're goin' RTX 3090, baby. So we're gonna start with 4K ray traced medium. And as expected, that's not like night and day. But I would also say that that is noticeably smoother. This is ray traced medium. Okay, given that the performance is not markedly better, I don't have a lot of hope for this, but I mean, you guys wanna see it, right? Okay. Well, you know what? To Nvidia and the game's credit, 24 FPS is a lot better than 15 FPS in terms of raw percentage. I wouldn't say that it's a great gaming experience, but it's a lot better. So this is 8K balanced, 20 FPS. Yeah. All right, here's the thing then. It comes down to your goal. The only reason to turn it to 8K is if you want the ultimate in image crispness and sharpness. And if that's what you're after, we already determined that turning on ray tracing, well, you're already making compromises to the sharpness at 4K. Let alone at 8K in order to maintain a playable frame rate. So clearly this is kind of like a pointless scenario. 8K with ray tracing, which requires DLSS, which reduces the sharpness, we've like got settings that are working against each other. So with that in mind, let's try it without ray tracing. DLSS is now off. Man, 8K continues to underwhelm me. Even if I don't move the camera around and we don't have any tearing or like really bad motion blur, like this is 23 FPS. This is cinematic frame rate right here, ladies and gentlemen. Like it's not bad. It just doesn't look that much better. And a big part of that is that the textures just aren't, they're not 8K because there's no point putting such gigantic textures in the game. Like this road looks like a video game texture, you know? And you do lose some of that resolution on the characters, which are one of the things that really stand out about the game to me as being so detailed when you're running at a frame rate like this. Like you can't, like here, let's wait for someone to walk right in front of us. And I'll show you, you can't make out the like, here. Like you can't make out their face really at all. Like you can't, hey, I think your spray can's broken there. But is that the same guy? Well, that's a bit of a letdown, 8K, totally not worth it. You know what though, we are recording right now. Okay, let's stop the recording. That camera's rolling. Okay, here we go. Let's see if that helps a lot. There's the 3090 flexing its muscles. All that extra VRAM means that, yeah, okay, the game still doesn't run perfect by any stretch of the imagination. But the difference between recording and not recording is only like one to two FPS now instead of absolutely tanking it like it did on the 3080. I mean, that was only applicable at 8K and I wouldn't run this game at 8K, but install the latest drivers. You've gotta be kidding me. Like just now? All right, sure. All right, let's find out ladies and gentlemen. Running the game ready driver now on the RTX 3090 and we realized something. The quick presets do not adjust texture quality. You can only adjust texture quality in the main menu. So I would assume we were running on medium texture quality before. That kind of explains why vending machines, for example, were not changing their level of detail as we were flipping through the presets. Now, I don't see anything else in here that has appeared now that we're in the main menu. So on the RTX 3090, we're flipping over to high textures. I mean, it's got like oodles of VRAM anyway, so I wouldn't expect it to make much of a difference. But now you guys know, unfortunately, because of the DRM, I'm not gonna risk swapping the 3090 out and putting the 3080 back in. That's not happening. We're just gonna have to move forward with what we've got here. Anyway, the video is called running at max settings, not comprehensive benchmarking performance review. So this is gonna be that. Oh yeah. Yep. That looks way better. If you've got the VRAM, you are going to want to run it at high texture quality. Wow. So it's not everything, but where it makes a difference, that is a big difference. Let's see how the RTX 3090 handles this. So video, yeah, still at 4K, still at 4K guys. Preset, ray tracing medium, here we go. Mm. 67 FPS in here. Let's check. We might not even need it to be on that. Whether it's the game ready driver or the RTX 3090 upgrade is hard to say at this point, unfortunately, because everything's changing so fast right now. But 50 FPS in here with quality DLSS, dang, 40 out on the street. So I wouldn't say that the game ready driver probably changed the actual performance of the game that much. Looks like more like, you know, it's tuned as opposed to you suddenly go to 300 FPS from, you know, 50 or whatever. Of course, we got to try 8K. I said I was going to run the game on max settings. So you ready? Ray tracing ultra, textures high. Yeah, you're probably right. Cause it sucks. Should we just turn DLSS off? All right, this is it ladies and gentlemen. The moment you waited for, 8K, everything absolutely maxed. Oh right, I got to actually change the resolution. Well, it's going to be a graphics card generation or two before we're going to get playable frame rates in this game at 8K without any deep learning super sampling tricks. But when that happens, it's going to look real fly. Two things to disclaim here guys. One, this is of course a pre-release copy of the game. So it might not be indicative of final performance. And number two, don't expect this to go from seven FPS to playable in seven hours or however long it is from the game comes out. I think seven FPS is probably enough for candlelight. It's really not. Like that is gorgeous. All right, so why don't we try and see if we can make 8K playable then. So DLSS, I mean, we're going to have to go to like, let's try performance. 3090 going to performance seems to do it. But as I said, in a take that we might've ended up throwing away, this is not how I would run the game. Because if your goal is the absolute sharpest resolution, well, I mean, that's the only reason to turn it to 8K, then you don't want to be running DLSS in performance mode, obviously, because it really hurts the sharpness of the image, particularly around the edge in general, it hurts the sharpness of the image in a big way. You'd be far better off just running at one quarter of the pixel count, running at 4K and enjoying that additional sharpness. And not using DLSS in performance mode, being able to use it in quality mode. That would be a much better experience. You're kind of working against yourself, but hey, we did it. And you know what you guys did? You made it all the way to the end of this video so that I could tell you again, thank you for watching. Thanks to Origin PC for sponsoring it and lttstore.com. You know, if your CPU is not fast enough for cyberpunk, well, at least your head can be comfortable while you rest and wait for a faster CPU to just magically appear.