Cyberpunk 2077
- Overview
- v9 — Physically Accurate Path Tracing
- Requirements
- Usage Tips
- Rendering Modes
- Denoiser Presets
- SHaRC Radiance Cache
- Lighting Presets
- Per-Light Modifications
- General Bug Fixes
- Configuration
- Optional Debug Panel
- Other Features
Overview
Ultra+ is a comprehensive path tracing, ray tracing, and rendering overhaul for Cyberpunk 2077. It provides deep control over lighting, denoising, SHaRC radiance caching, streaming, and per-light properties through an in-game CET overlay. Ultra+ can force all lights to fully participate in path tracing, modify shadow behavior, adjust fog influence, fix particle brightness, and provides bug and consistency fixes over the vanilla game.
As usual with Ultra+ mods, the emphasis is not on changing the look and feel of the game, but rather on maximizing performance and visual quality, and giving the user full control over the engine if they desire.
- Lights not affecting fog
- Incorrect reflections
- Several lights not casting on surfaces (floor)
- Incorrect specularity on floors
- Missing red light on ceiling
- Many lights don’t cast light onto surrounding objects
- Some lights blocked from casting outside the building (onto seats and ground)
- Bounce lighting is artificially limited
- Some lights not included in reflections
- Incorrect specular on road
- Many lights don’t cast light
- Many lights aren’t fully path traced
- Some lights blocked from casting across the full scene (e.g. red light)
- Steam/smoke is not fully realised
- Many lights not included in reflections
- Bounce lighting artificially limited
- Raster lighting in trees
- Lights aren’t fully reflected on specular (shiny) surfaces
- Fake (raster) lighting in background
- Lights not fully considered in fog
- Bounce lighting stops at palm trees on left
v9 — Physically Accurate Path Tracing
The most significant update to Cyberpunk’s lighting in Ultra+ history.
Ultra+ v9 rebuilds Cyberpunk 2077’s entire lighting system from the ground up in C++. This is the full realization of what the community calls “V4” lighting — a physically-based lighting system for path tracing with nothing else like it.
Background
To keep compatibility with ray tracing, and reduce the cost to implement path tracing, Cyberpunk’s PT lighting contains tens of thousands of “fake” lights: lights hanging in mid-air which are not associated with any physical light in the game. These cause inconsistencies, and lighting that is not physically accurate to the real world.
The problem is, how do we fix this? To find and remove tens of thousands of lights would require months of work. Ultra+ v9 deals with this by using advanced heuristics to analyze the world and remove lights as the game streams, adjusting remaining lights so they fully participate in path tracing. It does this in microseconds in native C++ via RED4ext, and has no performance cost.
What’s new
- First time starts in Simple Mode to make life easy for new users
- Advanced Mode gives you full access “under the hood”
- Cyberpunk’s lighting system completely rebuilt for physically accurate path tracing
- Fake light channels and blockers, which constrict light casting, are stripped everywhere
- Every light updated to cast based on its real physical properties
- All lights fully participate in reflections, GI, shadows, fog, and specular
- All fake raster/RT lights are detected and removed automatically via accurate heuristics
- Light draw distance dramatically increased (+400m in Night City, +200m in Dogtown) with zero effective performance impact
- A sector exclusion system for fine-tuning problematic areas (including Sector Gather tool)
- ReLUX’d areas are auto-detected and fully supported (supports any combination of ReLUX archives)
- Preem Hair compatibility auto-detected and supported
- Conflicting mod detection with warnings on startup
- Hot Reload World button — performs a warm engine reboot and optionally reloads all .archive files
- A Save/Restore Location system for virtual photography
- Smart caching system and optimized C++
- Custom theme support (create your own via themes.ini)
Removed/replaced in v9 (no longer needed)
- Glass Transparency Fix (fixed by new lighting system)
- Extended Black Floor Fix (no longer required)
- Disappearing NPCs Fix toggle (now always enabled)
- ReLUX manual toggle (now auto-detected)
- Preem Hair toggle (now auto-detected)
Mod Conflicts (Path Tracing Only)
The following mods are not compatible with V4 Path Tracing:
- Disable Fake Lights with Path Tracing
- Ray Traced Lighting Fixes
- Reference Path Tracing
- Improved Vehicle Lights Draw Distance
- Faster Rainmap and Distant Shadows
Recommended Mods → Path Tracing and Ray Tracing
Tip: Instead of installing these individually, you can use the Ultrapunk mod collection, which focuses on visual fidelity, stability, and quality-of-life improvements while preserving Cyberpunk 2077’s core gameplay.
- Draw Distance ReImagined
- General Shadows Fixes
- Improved Distant Shadows and Reflections
- Always Best Quality
- Improved Environment LODs
- Improved Vegetation LODs
- Not So Good Draw Distance
- The Nullifier — Important: set ‘Fix Broken PT Lights’ to disabled
Recommended Mods → Ray Tracing and RT+PT
For Ray Tracing we recommend these mods in addition to the above Recommended Mods
Ultra+ does not attempt to fix Ray Traced lighting. Instead we recommend these excellent mods by sosuine which do.
- Ray Traced Lighting Fixes
- Disable Fake Lights with Path Tracing
- Improved Vehicle Lights Draw Distance
Requirements
Required:
Recommended for Path Tracing:
See the v9 compatibility section above for the full recommended mod list, or use the Ultrapunk collection.
Usage Tips
- All settings are controlled through the in-game CET overlay (default: ~ key)
- Settings are persisted to
UltraPlusConfig.iniand restored on game launch - Simple mode provides reduced options for quick setup (Raster, RT, RT+PT, PT Fast, PT Best); Advanced mode gives full control over all rendering modes and settings
- Auto Quality dynamically adjusts quality to maintain your FPS target
- When the game changes denoiser (e.g. photo mode), gradient/AntiFirefly settings switch automatically
- Ultrapunk Compatibility mode available for Ultimate Vanilla+ users
Rendering Modes
Ultra+ supports multiple rendering modes, from traditional rasterization to cutting-edge path tracing. Each path tracing mode uses a different NVIDIA technology stack with distinct trade-offs.
- Raster — Traditional rendering, no ray tracing. Ultra+ makes minimal changes in this mode because the engine settings are mostly fixed for raster. Performance is mostly controlled through the game menu.
- RT — Ray tracing (reflections, shadows, lighting). Ultra+ makes minimal changes, plus several bug fixes to shadows, translucent materials, and lights. Performance is still mostly controlled through the game menu options.
- RT+PT — Very similar to ray tracing, with added bounce lighting from NVIDIA ReBLUR global illumination. This mode is essentially a hack and has been very popular for AMD users who can’t quite run path tracing. It also works for NVIDIA, however it does not work with Ray Reconstruction and works with the NRD denoiser only.
- Vanilla — As close to vanilla path tracing as possible, with optionally some of the fixes from Ultra+. PT21 differs from Vanilla with several performance and ghosting noise improvements.
| PT16 | PT20 | PT21 | Next | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Technology | ReBLUR | ReLAXGI RTXDI | ReSTIRGI RTXDI | ReGIRGI RTXDI |
| From Game Version | 1.6x | 2.0x | 2.1+ | N/A (not active in any version) |
| Supported Denoisers | NRD | NRD Ray Reconstruction | NRD Ray Reconstruction | NRD Ray Reconstruction |
| Performance | Fastest of all PT modes | 'Fast' is very fast Slow at 'High' and 'Insane' | Good | Good |
| Quality | Very consistent lighting | Full quality | Full quality | Full quality |
| Caveats | Simplified lighting | Player is not path traced | None | GI updates slowly in just a few scenes |
| Recommended GPU | AMD | AMD Nvidia | Nvidia | AMD |
| Notes | Best balance if you need more FPS | Best quality for Nvidia | Fastest on some AMD GPUs |
PT16
Uses NVIDIA ReBLUR naive path tracing from the Cyberpunk ~1.63 era. PT16 is the fastest path tracing method and produces a very consistent image throughout the game — even more so than ray tracing. The lighting is not as detailed as newer modes, but if PT20 is too demanding for your hardware, PT16 is a great alternative.
PT20
Recommended fastest path tracing mode. Uses NVIDIA ReLAX naive path tracing combined with RTXDI, introduced in Cyberpunk 2.0. PT20 is widely regarded as the fastest path tracing method with very minimal downsides. Lighting is generally physically accurate, making it an excellent option for lower-end cards to experience high quality path tracing. Only a few areas of the game exhibit boiling noise, which is gradually being addressed by newer DLSS versions. This mode is also often preferred by AMD users.
PT21
Recommended best path tracing mode. Uses NVIDIA ReSTIR GI combined with RTXDI and SHaRC, introduced in Cyberpunk 2.1 and still the game’s current default path tracing. ReSTIR is a newer method that uses importance sampling to resolve scene detail, rather than the rays-and-bounces approach of PT16 and PT20. With the V4 lighting system in v9 of Ultra+, all lighting errors with PT21 are fixed.
Next
Uses NVIDIA ReGIR GI combined with RTXDI and SHaRC — a rendering path exposed in the engine but not available in the vanilla game. Ultra+ fully enables this mode. The SHaRC being overly dark in some scenes has also been fixed in recent Ultra+ versions. Next is slightly slower than PT21, with slight improvements to accuracy. This used to be the main recommended mode to work around errors in vanilla lighting, however with the V4 Lighting System in v9 of Ultra+, the difference between Next and PT21 is minimal.
Denoiser Presets
- NRD DLSS — Standard NVIDIA NRD denoising for DLSS users
- NRD AMD — Standard NVIDIA NRD denoising tuned for AMD users
- RR Clean — Needs DLSS 310.6 or higher Tunes NVIDIA ReLAX to do less work, which allows DLSS to do more of the denoising. DLSS contains newer denoising techniques than the 3+ year old ReLAX. This approach yields a sharper image when using newer DLSS models. This is the best balance for image stability, noise, and sharpness.
- RR Sharp — Needs DLSS 310.6 or higher A more aggressive disablement of NVIDIA ReLAX, allowing DLSS to do even more of the work, with a focus on image sharpness. It’s generally very good, however may cause minor path tracing artifacts (ghosting) in some areas.
- Vanilla — The game’s default denoiser configuration
SHaRC Radiance Cache
NVIDIA SHaRC is a radiance cache technology that adds information to the scene so the denoiser (DLSS) has to do less work to fully resolve the image. In the vanilla game, SHaRC is implemented too darkly in some scenes, which actually removes path tracing information, giving DLSS less to work with. This causes additional boiling and ghosting noise in certain areas. See the NVIDIA SHaRC documentation for a technical overview.
Since v8.0.0, Ultra+ has a workaround for this issue which has continued to improve, resolving boiling issues in the vanilla game (the most notable being boiling on the ceiling of your main H10 apartment) so that SHaRC is generally the correct brightness for the scene. v8.3.0 and higher also attempts to address this by standardizing how light nodes input information into the SHaRC radiance cache.
- Off, Off (Cache Only), Vanilla, Fast, Med, High, Insane
- Off (AMD Pink Tracing) option for AMD users
- Optional frame blending disable for maximum image stability (recommended)
Lighting Presets
- Vanilla — Identical lighting balance (direct lights, GI, bounce lighting, sky, etc.) as the vanilla game
- Next — Close to vanilla, but slightly brightens bounce lighting, which can help reduce boiling noise
- Natural — Evenly darkens all lights to give a more subdued and natural-looking lighting style that can look very nice especially with realistic LUTs
- Bold — Slightly brightens some lighting endpoints to give more pronounced lighting, which can work very well with stylistic LUTs
- Flat — Sets all lighting endpoints to a flat 1.0 (vanilla is closer to 1.2), which gives a very even and realistic look. This could be close to path tracing “ground truth” or reference image, if you are seeking the most physically accurate lighting
- PT20/PT21 — Similar to Next, the lighting is tuned to yield the highest image stability for these modes, with minimal changes but less emphasis on lighting accuracy
- Stronger Bounce Lighting toggle boosts sky and global diffuse
Per-Light Modifications
Note: In v9, light channel removal and fake light detection is handled automatically in C++ via the new V4 lighting system. The Redscript-based per-light approach below applies to v8.x and is retained for RT/RT+PT modes.
Ultra+ uses Redscript to optionally modify individual light properties at runtime:
- Force all lights to participate in path tracing (GI, reflections, specular, fog, transparents)
- Force all lights to cast PT shadows (local shadows, contact shadows, RT contact shadow range)
- Volumetric fog influence control (Vanilla, Double, Triple, Force 30/50/100%)
- Roughness bias clamping for sharper specular
- Light radius clamping to prevent over-brightening
- Extended light streaming distance (+1000m)
- Smoke/steam particle brightness fix (diffuseWrapFactor, backLightingFactor)
General Bug Fixes
- PT Hair Lighting Fixes (with optional Preem Hair support)
- Disappearing NPCs Fix — fixes NPCs that were just there going missing or changing when you turn around
- Black Bar on Left Side of Screen Fix — fixes the annoying black moving bar down the left side of the screen in vanilla path tracing
- PT Missing Reflections Fix
- Dark SHaRC Fix — fixes SHaRC being overly dark and increasing path tracing noise (boiling, ghosting — see SHaRC section above for details)
- PT Slow Updating at Screen Edges Fix — when motion blur is disabled, lights can resolve slowly at the edges of the screen, possibly due to a motion vector bug in the vanilla game. This fix enables motion blur at a very low setting which, unlike vanilla motion blur used as an effect, imperceptibly smooths motion while fixing the issue. We at Ultra+ believe motion blur should emulate how a camera works, not be used as a visual effect.
- Fix Smoke/Steam Brightness for PT — originally a separate mod called Ultra Fog, now integrated into the main mod as an option
- PT Rain/Particle Quality — enables an in-engine option to better integrate particle (smoke, steam, rain) colour into path tracing, except in circumstances where it doesn’t work correctly, where Ultra+ invisibly disables the effect
- Missing Shadows on Lakes/Rivers — fixes many large bodies of water not having shadows from bridges and buildings
- Disappearing Distant Rain — increases the engine budget for rain, allowing rain and wet materials to draw into the distance
- Disappearing Distant Shadows — increases the engine budget for shadows, allowing shadows to draw farther into the distance
- LOD0 Faster AI Ticking — increases animation smoothness for NPCs and vehicles closest to you
- Streaming Improvements — changes the frame timing for loading and unloading sectors and in-game assets to be better suited to smooth streaming for PCs. Especially helps reduce hitching at sector boundaries and while driving.
- Skin Specular Fix — slightly adjusts skin specular levels to be more suitable for path tracing
- VRAM Warnings — Ultra+ will let you know when you’re about to run out of VRAM. When low on VRAM for a sustained period, Cyberpunk will slow down then crash to desktop
Configuration
| Setting | Location | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Mode | Ultra+ tab | Select rendering mode (Raster through Next) |
| Quality | Ultra+ tab | Fast, Med, High, Insane, Auto |
| SHaRC Quality | Ultra+ tab | Off through Insane, with frame blending toggle |
| Streaming | Ultra+ tab | Controls asset streaming frame timing (Vanilla, Low, Med, High, Insane, Auto). Higher settings improve smooth loading of sectors and assets, reducing hitching at boundaries and while driving. |
| Denoiser | Ultra+ tab | NRD/RR tuning presets |
| Lighting | Ultra+ tab | Lighting balance presets |
| Force All Lights Are PT | Fixes section | Forces all lights to fully participate in path tracing |
| Force All Lights Cast PT Shadows | Fixes section | Forces local + contact shadows on all lights |
| Fix Smoke/Steam Brightness | Fixes section | Reduces particle over-brightness for PT |
| Update Lights Influence on Fog | Fixes section | Controls per-light volumetric fog contribution |
| Remove Roughness Bias | Fixes section | Remove smoothing from all PT lights (not recommended for RT) |
| PT Hair Lighting Fixes | Fixes section | Adjusts hair for PT lighting |
| Disappearing NPCs Fix | Fixes section | Always enabled — prevents NPC despawn on camera turn |
| PT Slow Update Fix | Fixes section | Fixes dark screen edges with PT |
| Ultrapunk Compatibility | Compatibility section | Ultimate Vanilla+ compatibility mode |
| Stronger Bounce Lighting | Tweaks section | Boosts sky and global diffuse |
| FPS Target | Quality section | Target FPS for Auto Quality |
| Auto-Confirm Menu Changes | Settings tab | Auto-apply Cyberpunk menu changes |
| Auto-restore Graphics Menu | Settings tab | Restore game graphics menu settings on game launch |
| Theme | Settings tab | UI color theme (Ultra+, Cyber Night, Default) |
| Language | Settings tab | 11 supported languages |
| UI Scale | Settings tab | Scale the Ultra+ window |
| Enable Console Output | Settings tab | Show Ultra+ log output in the CET console |
| Enable Tooltips | Settings tab | Show helpful tooltips on hover |
| Show FPS Overlay | Settings tab | Display FPS counter in the Ultra+ overlay |
| Show VRAM in Overlay | Settings tab | Display VRAM usage in the overlay |
| Display VRAM Warnings | Settings tab | Warn when free VRAM is low |
| Game Menu Snapshot/Restore | Settings tab | Snapshot and restore individual game menu pages (Sound, Controls, Gameplay, Graphics, Video, Interface, Key Bindings, Language, Accessibility) |
Optional Debug Panel
Debug mode can be enabled from Ultra+ > Settings, or by placing an empty file called debug in the main UltraPlus CET folder (no restart necessary). This enables a Debug panel that lets you play with many of the engine’s hidden settings in real time, plus Virtual Photography mode. Generally only recommended for advanced users and troubleshooting, or when directed to do so by an Ultra+ team member.
The Debug panel exposes low-level engine toggles including separate denoising, RTXDI gradients, shadow optimizations, spatiotemporal DI, PT fallback lighting, emissive triangle lights, environmental lights, path traced skylight, RT global shadows, raytraced shadow cascades, foliage shadows, local shadows, ReSTIR GI controls, boiling filter, NRD rejitter, and more. A search filter is provided to quickly find specific settings.
Other Features
- Game Menu settings snapshot/restore system
- Reload World — fast warm engine reboot, also reloads all .archive files via ArchiveXL
- Virtual Photography mode (Debug) — dramatically increases LOD distances for screenshots
- Conflicting mod detection with startup warnings
- Custom theme support (create your own via themes.ini)
- 11 languages (English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Traditional Chinese, plus Pirate and Brainrot)
- GPU and VRAM detection via RED4ext