YouTuber gets Cyberpunk 2077 to run at playable frame rates on just 1GB of VRAM

Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the most graphically pleasing games out there, particularly when you crank all of the graphics settings to their max and use the game's ray tracing features with a supported GPU. However, modders have also discovered the game's engine is surprisingly tweakable, to the point where you can run the game on almost any piece of PC hardware. YouTuber Budget-Builds Official accomplished a challenge to get the game to run on an R7 370 with just 1GB of VRAM at a playable frame rate.

The challenge took more than just tweaking all the graphics settings to low; the YouTuber had to go into the game's .ini file and tweak graphics settings below what the low preset allows in-game to achieve a playable frame rate. To get a baseline, the YouTuber ran the game's benchmark out of the box with default graphics settings and found the game ran just shy of 30 FPS.

Tweaking the .ini files enabled the YouTuber to change a variety of settings, including the following: reducing FOV and effect quality to their absolute minimum, turning off global illumination, distant global illumination, and SSAO. Turning down screen space reflections almost entirely, turning off volumetric fog, distant volume fog, and distant fog. Modifying the shadow settings to reduce culling distance and quality, so that the shadows are virtually nonexistent. Turning off post processing, bloom, motion blur, chromatic aberration, film grain, lens flair, AA, and dynamic decals.

The last setting the YouTuber modified was the in-game resolution. The lowest resolution the game officially supports is 1024x768, but to achieve a higher frame rate, a resolution of 640x480 was necessary. To do this, the YouTuber had to jump through a few hoops, including booting the game at 800x600 in windowed mode, swapping between fullscreen and windowed mode, changing the Windows desktop resolution to 640x480, and finally swapping back to the game and enabling fullscreen mode again. It is a cumbersome way to force the game to run at 480p, but it worked.

With all of these modifications added, the game ran significantly better, achieving above 30 FPS in most situations. In the in-game benchmark, the game achieved 45 FPS, while in-game, the game achieved a similar frame rate, except in intense fighting, when the game dropped below 30 FPS.

Frametimes were not perfect, but it's impressive to see Cyberpunk 2077 running on 1GB of VRAM at all, let alone at a playable frame rate. The game's minimum requirements demand a 6GB GPU or better, showing how extreme this mod is. For perspective, the last NVIDIA GeForce graphics card with 1GB of VRAM was the GTX 750 that launched in 2014.