Yes, Cyberpunk 2077 is already in HD—it goes way past HD for anyone playing in 2K or 4K, even—but if you ever stopped to look at the game’s ground textures and walls, you may have noticed they’re not as sharp as some of the more attention-grabbing parts of the world.
That’s to be expected, of course, no developer in their right mind would spend as much time on a patch of dirt as they would the character’s apartment or car. But when a certain type of game reaches a certain level of popularity, there are people out there who want to see what that looks like, cost be damned.
You might not remember, but back in 2020 I wrote about a Witcher 3 project undertaken by HalkHogan, a modder who wanted to give Geralt’s world a makeover, replacing the game’s default environment textures with new ones that were vastly more detailed. That mod proved so good, and so successful, that developers CD Projekt Red included it in their recent next-gen re-release of The Witcher 3.
Well HalkHogan is now back with much the same thing for CDPR’s follow-up, Cyberpunk 2077, announcing that his HD Reworked Project is now underway and posting a video showcasing some of his work.
While you’d expect that adding something like this to the game would come with a performance hit, HalkHogan says that so long as you have enough spare VRAM, you won’t notice and slowdown whatsoever. And if you do, he’s releasing two versions of the mod:
In general, the modification doesn’t hit performance in any way if you have enough amount of VRAM (video card memory). Even if you run out of memory a bit, it shouldn’t be a problem (and if it will, you can always easily uninstall the mod).
There are two versions of the modification, adapted to what the graphics card you have.
Cyberpunk 2077 HD Reworked Project Ultra Quality: contains the highest quality textures and gives the best visual experience. Highly recommended for 2K/4K displays. Game can use up to max 800MB more VRAM so most modern graphics cards should easy deal with it.
Cyberpunk 2077 HD Reworked Project Balanced: maintains high textures quality with lower VRAM usage. Recommended for graphics cards with less amount of memory. Game can use up only about 400MB more VRAM so basically everyone who can comfortably play the game can use this without experiencing any significant performance drops while having noticeably better textures.
Version 1.0 of the project is available now on Nexus Mods.
