Well, yesterday I went viral.
It was not, surprisingly, for a Destiny meme, but rather a comparison shot I shared from Cyberpunk 2077, putting up a screen capture pulled from my Xbox Series X against the same shot from the PC version of the game.
Most people were shocked at the comparison, others accused me of somehow doctoring the image or changing my settings to make it look worse on purpose. All I can say is that this is a screenshot shared directly from Xbox Series X (which runs an upconverted One X build), all the graphics settings were default and it was…daytime, which I guess can change the lighting, or sometimes bug it out entirely. But yes, it really did look this bad, hence why I was inspired to take the screenshot in the first place.
After this got traction, I was told what the main issue was. Well, outside of this game being made first and foremost for PC and very much unfinished for consoles. It was that CDPR’s default graphics and HDR settings are either bad or outright bugged.
And, after some fiddling, I have managed to make my game look a lot better on Xbox Series X, and while I don’t know what graphic options are available on every console, PS4, PS4 Pro, Xbox One, Xbox One X and PS5, some of these will be. For base PS4 and Xbox One we are probably in “abandon all hope ye who enter here” territory and nothing can be done. But these others? There’s probably some amount of work to be done.
Quality vs. Performance
Honestly, this might be the biggest difference maker on its own. The game defaults to Performance on Series X for a higher framerate, but you are losing a ton of visual fidelity to do this. And in fact, switching over to Quality not only improves the visuals but you genuinely don’t lose as many frames as you might think. I’ve heard rumors that this is somehow bugged and the game manages to actually run better in Quality mode over Performance for some reason, but all I know is that for me, it’s easily the better pick.
HDR
This is a pretty big one as nearly everyone I’ve talked to universally agrees that HDR is totally messed up at default here. I was advised to turn off HDR altogether, which I had to do at a system level on Series X, but I found that personally, it didn’t really solve the tone and color and brightness problems. Rather, what helped was changing the settings pretty dramatically from their defaults.
Here’s what worked for my on my Sony 55” 4K OLED:
- Maximum Brightness – 900
- Tone-Mapping Midpoint – 1.30
- Paper White – 170
I had some people telling me to turn the Midpoint way, way down to like 0.65, but I found it made night sections pretty much impossible to see at all. These are the settings I have found 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 tons of people hate motion blur so use your own discretion)
When you combined all of these different things, it really did make the game look better for me on Series X. No, not PC level, of course, and I cannot say if this will produce the exact same results on other consoles, as some may not have these options or just be past savings. But yes, it’s wild how bad the default settings are here, given that probably 95% of console players never touch these settings in a normal game. But here, you definitely need to.
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