Cyberpunk 2077 PS5 Pro Update: Three Modes vs Base PS5 and PC

The April 8, 2026 patch is the first time a console version of Night City has matched what PC players have been showing off for three years. The Cyberpunk 2077 PS5 Pro update introduces three distinct graphics modes, the second generation of Sony's PSSR upscaler, and a new 8-way bounding volume hierarchy that finally lets the console handle ray-traced reflections, shadows, ambient occlusion, skylight, and emissive lighting at the same time. It is also the moment the base PS5 stopped being the benchmark anyone reaches for when describing how this game looks.

The April 8, 2026 patch specifically uses PSSR 2 and BVH8, described as a massive technical jump from the base console's 30 FPS cap. That single sentence does a lot of work. The base PS5 never offered a 60 FPS mode with ray tracing on, the upscaler shimmered, and reflections were limited to a narrow set of surfaces. Sony and CD Projekt Red have effectively rebuilt the renderer for Pro hardware while leaving the original console's profile alone.

What the PS5 Pro update actually adds

Three modes ship in the patch, and each targets a different display. According to the PlayStation Blog, the PS5 Pro update implements BVH8 (8-way Bounding Volume Hierarchy) support for ray-traced lighting, shadows, and reflections, and three PS5 Pro graphics modes are available: Ray Tracing Pro, Ray Tracing, and Performance. PSSR is the upscaler tying the whole thing together. PSSR (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution) AI upscaling is applied across all three modes.

BVH8 matters more than the marketing suggests. A bounding volume hierarchy is the data structure a GPU walks to figure out which rays hit which geometry; an 8-way tree lets each node test against eight child volumes instead of two or four, cutting traversal steps and freeing the ray-tracing units to do useful shading work. It is the same kind of architectural change PC GPUs picked up between RDNA 3 and Ada generations, and it is the reason the Pro can run effects the base PS5 simply cannot fit in its frame budget.

The upscaler is the other half of the story. The update includes PSSR 2 as the primary upscaler, with FSR 2.1 retained as a toggle option, and PSSR 2 is confirmed as the recommended rendering method, providing superior image quality compared to FSR 2.1. The fallback exists because some players prefer FSR's sharpening profile, but the default is the new one for a reason.

Ray Tracing Pro mode: the closest thing to PC parity

This is the headline mode. Ray Tracing Pro enables all ray tracing enhancements (reflections, ambient occlusion, skylight, shadows, emissive lighting), targeting 40 FPS on VRR displays or 30 FPS on standard 60Hz displays. CD Projekt Red's official patch notes describe what that means in practice: Ray Tracing Pro Mode adds ray-traced skylight, ray-traced emissive lighting, and ray-traced ambient occlusion on top of RT Mode's features.

Frame pacing is where this mode gets complicated. Digital Foundry's performance analysis noted brief frame rate dips below 40 FPS in the most demanding scenes in Ray Tracing Pro mode, and Digital Foundry expressed that a full ray tracing implementation option at lower resolution would have been preferable, according to Notebookcheck's coverage. The implication there is sharp. Digital Foundry would rather see a path-traced option at 1080p than a hybrid pipeline at 1440p, because path tracing is qualitatively different from stacking ray-traced effects on top of rasterized base lighting. The Pro is fast enough to talk about that trade-off, which is itself a milestone.

If your TV cannot do VRR, the 30 FPS cap is the right call. A 40 FPS target on a fixed 60Hz panel produces uneven frame delivery you can feel during driving, and locking to 30 keeps motion legible.

Ray Tracing mode: the 60 FPS compromise that finally works

The middle option is the one most players will actually leave selected. Ray Tracing mode maintains 60 FPS with select ray tracing effects enabled, and the patch notes get specific about which ones. Ray Tracing Mode specifically enables ray-traced reflections on vehicle paint and transparent objects, with all shadows rendered via ray tracing, at a stable 60 FPS.

Reflections on vehicle paint are doing heavy lifting in a city built around chrome and rain. The base PS5's RT mode could not hold 60 FPS with reflections enabled at all, so this is the first console configuration where the showcase feature and the showcase frame rate coexist. Minor frame rate drops in Ray Tracing and Performance modes also observed occasionally, but the word "minor" is doing the right amount of work here based on what reviewers have reported.

Performance mode: 90 FPS on the right TV

The high-frame-rate option is the clearest demonstration of what PSSR 2 buys you. Performance mode targets up to 90 FPS on VRR-enabled displays while maintaining high image fidelity, and Performance Mode is confirmed to target 60 FPS on regular displays, up to 90 FPS on VRR displays. The catch is that PSSR is doing aggressive reconstruction at this point, and the only reason the image holds up at 90 FPS is the new model.

PSSR 2 AI upscaling removes the shimmering and image reconstruction artifacts seen in the base PS5 version. That fix is overdue. The original PSSR build had visible ghosting on neon signage and Night City is essentially neon signage walking around with legs. If you have a 120Hz OLED with VRR, this is the mode that makes the Pro feel like a different machine. If your display tops out at 60Hz, the base PS5's performance mode looked similar at the cost of much worse aliasing.

How PS5 Pro stacks up against the base PS5

The gap is wider than a typical mid-generation refresh produces. The base PS5 capped out at a 30 FPS ray-tracing mode with a narrow effect set and a 60 FPS performance mode without any RT at all. The Pro runs ray-traced reflections, ray-traced shadows, and a stable 60 FPS in a single mode, and the Ray Tracing Pro mode layers on three more effects beyond that.

Image quality is the second axis where the comparison breaks down. The base PS5 used FSR 2.1 with the well-known shimmer and disocclusion artifacts that mode produces in dense scenes. Pro players get PSSR 2 by default, with the older FSR pipeline available if they want it. CD Projekt Red's patch notes confirm PSSR is an AI-powered upscaling technology dedicated to PS5 Pro; image is rendered at lower resolution then upscaled, which is the same approach DLSS and XeSS use on PC.

There are still limits the new hardware cannot brute-force. The PS5 Pro specs cannot entirely solve open-world pop-in issues in Cyberpunk 2077. Streaming geometry into a dense urban open world is a memory-bandwidth problem more than a compute problem, and the Pro inherited the base PS5's storage subsystem.

The patch also includes back-end work that benefits both consoles' ray tracing. The patch includes optimized ray-traced object queries and improved ray-tracing cache to reduce shadow popping. Shadow popping was one of the more distracting artifacts in the original RT implementation, and the cache rework appears to address it directly.

How the PS5 Pro experience compares to PC

This is the harder comparison, because PC has had path tracing since April 2023. According to CD Projekt Red's support documentation, Patch 1.62 introduced Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode, the next preset above Ray Tracing: Ultra that includes path-traced rendering, and Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode is currently recommended on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 Series (4070 Ti and up) graphics cards, also on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 (1080p, 30 fps). Overdrive Mode replaces the rasterized lighting baseline entirely with a unified path-traced pipeline, which is a fundamentally different rendering technique than what the Pro is doing.

The PS5 Pro's Ray Tracing Pro mode is hybrid rendering with a stack of RT effects on top. PC Overdrive is full path tracing. They are not the same thing, even when the screenshots look similar. PC players have long had access to a broader suite of ray tracing effects unavailable to PlayStation users before this update, and Overdrive remains exclusive to PC. Allkeyshop frames the gap accurately: the update narrows the gap between the console experience and high-end PC builds via PS5 Pro's dedicated machine learning units. Narrows, not closes. A 4070 Ti running DLSS 3 with Frame Generation still produces a visibly different image, and a 4090 in Overdrive is in another category entirely.

What the Pro does match is the practical experience for a player who is not pixel-peeping at 4K. Reflections look correct. Shadows are soft and grounded. Skylight bounces from the right places. The expensive parts of ray tracing are present, even if the final 5 percent of fidelity that path tracing provides is still PC-only.

Who should care about this update

For PS5 Pro owners, the answer is straightforward: install the patch and pick Ray Tracing mode unless you have a VRR display. The 60 FPS lock with ray-traced reflections and shadows is the right default for a game that asks you to drive through traffic and shoot at the same time.

For base PS5 owners, this update is the strongest argument the Pro has had since launch. Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the few games where the hardware difference is qualitative rather than incremental. The patch is also free if you have the right subscription tier. Cyberpunk 2077 is available at no extra cost to PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium members via the Games Catalog.

For PC players, nothing changes. Overdrive Mode still exists and still requires the kind of hardware that costs more than a Pro on its own. The interesting question is what Sony does with PSSR 2 across the rest of the catalog. If the upscaler holds up in less optimized titles the way it holds up here, the Pro's value proposition shifts. For more on how the console refresh fits into the broader picture, see our Gaming articles and the Valve Steam Controller (2026) review for context on where living-room PC gaming sits next to a Pro right now.

One more practical note for buyers weighing the upgrade: CD Projekt Red confirmed no further Cyberpunk 2077 DLC in 2026. This patch is the last major technical investment the studio is making in the game this year, which means what you see now is what the PS5 Pro version will look like for the foreseeable future. That is unusual for a game that has been patched continuously since 2020, and it tells you the team considers the Pro version finished. For broader display-side context on how these modes interact with HDR panels, the TVs articles section has more on VRR and 120Hz behavior across current sets.