Best Cyberpunk 2077 Settings on the Steam Machine

The short answer

Run Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p on the High preset with ray tracing OFF and you'll land in the low-60s fps range on the Steam Machine (~61 fps, estimated). That's playable and looks great, but it's a thin margin — the second you walk into a crowded market or a rain-soaked night drive, it can dip into the 50s.

If you want a steadier experience, drop to the Medium preset (~74 fps, estimated) and you get real headroom for the busy moments while keeping most of the visual punch. Low (~90 fps, estimated) exists if you're chasing a high-refresh display, but you don't need to go that far for a smooth living-room session.

The single most important thing to understand: ray tracing is not realistic on this 8 GB card. Don't fight it. Everything below assumes RT is off. See our full numbers on /games and how we test in methodology.

Recommended baseline: High preset, RT off

Start from High and make a few surgical cuts. High already looks excellent at 1080p, and the Steam Machine (RX 7600 / RTX 4060 class) has the raster muscle for it. Your job is to shave off the settings that cost the most frames for the least visual return, then claw back stability.

Load order:

1. Set resolution to 1920×1080.
2. Choose the High graphics preset.
3. Disable all ray tracing (lighting, reflections, shadows, GI). On an 8 GB card RT both tanks frames and balloons VRAM.
4. Set FSR to Quality (more on this below).
5. Apply, then make the targeted cuts in the next section.

What to turn down (and why)

These are the heavy hitters in Cyberpunk 2077. Cutting them buys you frames and — just as important — keeps you under the VRAM ceiling.

• Screen-Space Reflections → Low or Off. SSR is one of the most expensive raster settings in the game. Dropping from High/Ultra SSR to Low can return a meaningful chunk of frames with little visible loss while driving. Off is fine if you want maximum stability.
• Volumetric Clouds → Low. The "Volumetric Cloud Quality" slider is pure overhead for sky detail you rarely study. Low frees up frametime with almost no perceptible change at gameplay speed.
• Volumetric Fog Resolution → Medium. Keep some atmosphere, but Ultra fog is wasteful here. Medium is the sweet spot.
• Crowd Density → Medium. High crowd density is a CPU and traffic killer in Night City's busiest districts — exactly where your frametime spikes live. Medium thins the worst dips without making the city feel dead.
• Cascaded Shadows Range/Resolution → Medium. Distant shadow detail is a quiet frame thief. Medium is nearly invisible in motion.
• Local Shadow Quality / Mesh Quality → High is fine. Leave these; they're cheap and they carry a lot of the "AAA" look.

Make these cuts on top of the High preset and you'll typically convert that fragile ~61 fps into a more reliable 60+ that holds through the busy scenes.

FSR: use it, but be deliberate

Cyberpunk 2077 has excellent FSR integration, and at 1080p you want it on — it's your main lever for stability.

• FSR Quality is the default recommendation. It renders at a higher internal resolution and cleans up well at 1080p, giving you a solid frame boost with minimal softness.
• FSR Balanced is your escape hatch. If a specific area still chugs, Balanced buys more frames; the image gets a touch softer but stays very usable on a TV at couch distance.
• Avoid FSR Performance/Ultra Performance at 1080p unless you're desperate — the internal render resolution gets low enough that shimmer and smearing become obvious on a big screen.
• If your Steam Machine build offers frame generation, treat it as a smoothness booster for an already-decent base framerate, not a rescue for sub-40 fps. Frame-gen on a shaky base feels worse, not better.

The 8 GB VRAM texture caveat

This is the trap that bites people. The Steam Machine ships with an 8 GB VRAM ceiling, and Cyberpunk 2077 will happily try to use more than that — especially with high-res textures plus RT.

• Keep Texture Quality at High, not... well, there's no Ultra, but be aware textures are the biggest VRAM consumer. High is the right call; it looks great and fits the budget with RT off.
• RT off is half the battle — ray tracing inflates VRAM use dramatically. Turning it off is what makes High textures safe here.
• Watch for stutter and texture pop-in rather than a clean fps drop. When you exceed 8 GB, you don't always see the framerate crater — you feel hitches as the game swaps assets in and out of memory. That's your signal to back off SSR, fog, or drop FSR a notch.
• Mods that add 4K texture packs will blow the budget. Skip them on this hardware.

The 60-fps-locked recipe

Want a set-and-forget config that holds 60 on a living-room TV? Use this:

1. Resolution: 1920×1080.
2. Preset: Medium (start here, not High — the headroom is the point).
3. Ray tracing: Off, everything.
4. FSR: Quality.
5. Screen-Space Reflections: Low.
6. Volumetric Clouds: Low.
7. Crowd Density: Medium.
8. Cap the framerate at 60 in-game (or via the Steam Machine's frame limiter) and enable V-Sync to kill tearing.

Capping at 60 with Medium-plus-tweaks underneath gives the GPU breathing room, which means lower power draw, less fan noise, and far fewer dips than chasing an uncapped 70s number that bounces around. For a steady couch session, a locked 60 beats a jittery 75 every time.

If you have a 120 Hz display and want to push it, start from the High baseline above, lock to 60 anyway for consistency, or experiment with an uncapped High config and accept some variance.