Best ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ HDR Graphics and Settings to Transform on PlayStation and Xbox

Well yesterday i went viral.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t for a Destiny meme, but rather a comparison shot I shared from Cyberpunk 2077, placing a screenshot pulled from my Xbox Series X against the same shot from the PC version of the game.

Most people were surprised by the comparison, others accused me of manipulating the image in some way or changing my settings to make it look worse on purpose. All I can say is that this is a shared screenshot directly On Xbox Series X (running a converted One X build), all the graphics settings were default and it was … during the day, which I assume can change the lighting or sometimes turn it off completely. But yeah, it really looked that bad, which is why I was inspired to take the screenshot in the first place.

After this got traction, they told me what the main problem was. Well, outside of this game that was made primarily for PC and very unfinished for consoles. It was that the default CDPR graphics and HDR settings are bad or buggy.

And, after a few tweaks, I have managed to make my game look much better on Xbox Series X, and while I don’t know what graphics options are available on all consoles, PS4, PS4 Pro, Xbox One, Xbox One X, and PS5, some of these will be. For the PS4 and Xbox One base, we’re probably in “give up all hope whoever gets here” territory and there’s nothing to be done. But these others? There is probably a lot of work to do.

Quality vs. performance

Honestly, this could be the biggest difference on its own. The game defaults to Performance on X Series for a higher frame rate, but you are missing a you of visual fidelity to do this. And in fact, switching to Quality not only improves images, it doesn’t really lose as many frames as you might think. I heard rumors that this has some problem and the game manages to work. best in Quality over Performance mode for some reason, but all I know is that, for me, it’s easily the best option.

HDR

This one is pretty big, as almost everyone I’ve talked to universally agrees that HDR is totally screwed up by default here. I was advised to turn off HDR entirely, which I had to do at the system level on the X Series, but I found that personally it didn’t fix the hue, color and brightness issues. Rather, what helped was changing the settings quite dramatically from their default values.

Here’s what worked for my 55 ”Sony 4K OLED:

• Maximum brightness – 900
• Tone Mapping Midpoint – 1.30
• Paper white – 170

Some people were telling me to change the midpoint, I went down to 0.65, but found that it made the night sections practically impossible to see. These are the settings that I have found to be best for me.

Graphics Settings

Here are mine right now, based on the toggle switches you can flip, which are all on by default:

• Film grain: off
• Chromatic aberration: off
• Depth of field: on
• Lens flare: on
• Motion Blur: On (yes, I know many people hate motion blur so use your own discretion)

When you put all these different things together, it really made the game look better for me on Series X. No, not at the PC level of course, and I can’t tell if this will produce the exact same results on other consoles, as some may not have these options or are simply past savings. But yeah, it’s amazing how bad the default settings are here, given that probably 95% of console gamers never touch these settings in a normal game. But here, you definitely need to.

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