Cyberpunk 2077 may cause the occasional glitch, but it's hard to deny that it's a pretty game. Especially if you have hardware that enables ray tracing. andwhat112, an avid user of NexusMods (via Tom's Hardware), has discovered more hidden than the game's interface usually provides, including something called Cinematic RTX He discovered several switches.

Turning it on seems to increase the level of detail settings, lighting, and ambient occlusion, but at the cost of 2GB more VRAM usage compared to the highest in-game settings. We had a hard time finding a difference, but your mileage may vary.

The good news is that you don't have to download anything or edit hexadecimal to access this setting, you can simply create a shortcut to the game and add a switch to change its behavior on load.

If you are running the Steam version, simply right click on the game, select properties, and add -qualityLevel=Cinematic_RTX under launch options. [If you purchased the game directly from GOG, by default Cyberpunk2077.exe is located in the C:◆Program Files (x86)◆Cyberpunk2077binx64 directory. Right-click there and select "Create Shortcut" from the drop-down list. Right-click on this shortcut, select "Properties" from the drop-down list, and add the following after the "Target" box:

-qualityLevel=Cinematic_RTX

Press 'Ok' to save the changes and from this shortcut Launch the game and you should see all the pretty screens. If you want to use the normal settings, you can launch the game from the normal GOG launcher, or alternatively change the CInematic_RTX bit to one of the following:

Some options, such as the next generation console options, may not work at all, but the normal settings seem to work fine. Setting it to SafeMode is useful because it will allow you to boot up again if something goes wrong.

The dynamic world (characters constantly moving, player's view constantly shifting, ads changing every time the game loads, etc.) makes it difficult to compare settings, but I took some comparison shots using the two modes. Even with the same save point loaded and not touching the mouse at all, the different viewing angles seem to be annoying.

As I said, it's not clear what Cinematic_RTX offers for the in-game Psycho RTX settings (which I used here for comparison), but there may be places where it can take the already gorgeous visuals to the next level.

Update: Here is a scene using the Cinematic_RTX and Ultra RTX settings shown in Juxtapose. There are subtle differences in this scene as well, although the differences are not obvious. Look at the grass at the bottom of the scene.

It is worth noting that, at least in this scene, there is no obvious performance difference between the two modes.