Possible guide to fix a crashing game (especially when driving around in the city)

[maramsp]

Hey all.

I had my game crashing quite often before doing the stuff in this guide. Especially when driving in dense areas in the city. 

With this guide, I solved it and my game is not crashing anymore for now for 2 hours straight. Ofcourse i don't know if it will stay this way, but before the steps in this guide, my game was crashing at least every half an hour.

First a disclosure, this method is for nvidia cards only. Maybe parts of it will work for Amd and intel cards too, but I do have an nvidia rtx 4070 ti, so i know, with the latest nvidia drivers this should work for older cards too. But again, no guarantees.

Also, this guide is quite a long read, and does have some misspelling here and there, but ive tried my best to make it as easy as i can tell it. But English is not my native tongue, as I'm dutch. So please accept that lol.

If you gonna follow my guide to the letter, and have the nova city mod installed (and the weathermancer too), go ingame first, press escape, click mods, go to the weathermancer, load the first weather (sunny), then click the option to force the game to revert (or something like that, cause i cant check it anymore cause i have nova city uninstalled as i will mention later in this guide) and then manual (so not auto) save your game, and quit the game. 

Then (or if you dont have nova city installed)

First and foremost what to do: 
Disable path tracing if you have it enabled (and switch down to RT if you have the ultra plus mod) and let only ray tracing be active and max out the ingame ray tracing settings. 
Next, still in the ingame settings, if your card is powerful enough to get decent fps without DLSS active, then let it be disabled.
If not, and you need dlss, then let it be on auto, and ray reconstruction disabled as well.
So no stubbornness, and setting it on dlaa, quality, or whatsoever. Just auto with ray reconstruction disabled.
Again, if you use the ultra plus mod, set this back to RT, and afterwards make a manual (no auto) save, and reload, and quit the game.

Next up, also quite important, go this site:

https://www.techpowerup.com/download/drivers/

And click on Nvidia dlss dll, nvidia dlss 3.5 ray reconstruction dll, and nvidia dlss 3 frame generation dll.

Don't download and install the most up to date versions yet, cause sometimes (again for me couple of days back, before sorting the rest of this guide) the latest versions won't boot your game at all.

So download these 3 first as a backup: 

Nvidia dlss dll: 3.7.10
Nvidia dlls 3.5 ray reconstruction: 3.7.0
Nvidia dlss 3 frame generation: 3.7.1

These worked for me straight out of the box, even with my broken mods installed, so I consider these the most stable versions to rely back on when the other versions fail.

So, download them, and place them somewhere on your pc, to have the backup. And also in that backup create another backup folder, where you copy and paste the same file names that are in the zip folders, that also can be found in your game folder (cyberpunk\bin\x64)

The files that you wanna copy from said game folder are the 3 files that start with nvgnx as their names. 

So in the end, before installing the latest versions on the above website, make sure, you have both the older versions as a first backup, and your original game ones as a second back up, so you won't have to verify integrity and so forth anymore.

After that backup is done, download the latest versions of the website:
https://www.techpowerup.com/download/drivers/
and install them, and see if your game runs. If no, then first revert back to the older versions, if still no revert back to your game's backup.

Test the game, to see if you can get ingame, but immediately if you are in the game, alt f4 back out, cause we have some other work to do.

Thirdly, its time to talk about some mods.

How sad I am to announce this, it IS what made my game a lot more stable, and this is completely getting rid of GITS:
https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/9274
Ofcourse, GiTS have some amazing lightning if you installed it correctly, but instead, you better get Preem lut:
https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/11510
And then install both the lut AND the lightning, as they are standalone.

I also did had nova lut installed, but also get rid of that, cause again: It's very awesome, but seems not as stable as that preem lut and lightning is, ESPECIALLY with path tracing.

When you've done that, its time to talk about weather mods.

Unofortunally the nova city weather is really amazing, but again, not so stable since it is a beta. And since i noticed that i also was crashing, was when a nova city specific weather was loaded in.
Have to say here though that it was not always the case, and sometimes the weather just loaded in fine. But about 80% of my crashes where specifically when a nova city weather was loaded in. 

So, for now I didn't have found a replacement weather mod to get instead, so for me its back to the vanilla weather system, which btw works great in combo with preem lut and lightning imo. I mean, in the desert it feels like a desert, and when its raining, it rains like cats and dogs for me

But, were not done yet.

If you have the nova city population mod installed:
https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/13429?tab=files

Get rid of it, and use vanilla density settings. Believe me, at rush hour times if you set the vanilla density settings at their max, then still it feels like sort of rush hour. Not as much as that a real rush hour in such a city would be. But honestly, imo then the game is unplayable cause of manouvrebility (sorry for misspelling, and for misspelling in this whole guide btw) cause of the dense traffic. And trust me, i have tried extreme density mods, and while they where fun to see in action, it was not something where you could say from: Hey thats a great mod to have for gameplay.

Okay, with that done, we have only one thing left to do while were still outside the game, and that is installing another mod.

If you have a card that is powerfull enough to do ray tracing (again, leave path tracing alone) then download the ultraplus mod:
https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/10490?tab=description
if you dont have it installed already. If you do have it already, then (if you followed this guide to the letter) then you already set the ultra plus to PT, and have no path tracing enabled in the ingame settings, and have ray tracing maxed out.

If you just installed it cause of this guide, or if you set the correct settings earlier... No matter what, because it's time to boot up the game again.

Try loading a safe, and see if the game is playable for you. If you do have the ultra plus mod installed, you can also easily check the fps there. But do keep in mind that even if you have, lets say only 45fps, then its still pretty decent. If you drop around to 30 or even lower, then you might consider to remove ultra plus, and disable ray tracing altogether in the game, or only enable one or 2 ray tracing options. 

So, if the game is playable? Great! Hope it stays like that, and please let me know IF this helped for you indeed as well.

Like i said, if the fps is low, consider dropping ultra plus, and raytracing altogether. But if you have some pop in issues, and having the improved vegetation lod mod, and improved environment lod mod installed, together with not so good draw distance, then lower the settings a bit of not so good draw distance

I lowered the settings by 5 for the ones that were initial lower numbers, f.e from 10 to 5, and lowered it by 10 if the numbers where higher, from 30 to 20, f.e, and the last setting i lowered from i believe it was 150 to a hundred.

This, combined with a lot of other mods that i have, made my game finally stable, even while driving at high speeds at dense areas. 

You gotta give something up, like the amazing relight, but get a pretty decent lightning mod back for it (nova lut lightning)
And yes, you gotta give up custom weather and traffic density, but for me the aim was to enjoy the game again, not perse getting every little bit of juice out of it, to make it as pretty as possible.

For example, path tracing, especially the path tracing from ultra plus the pt21 and up, and then with maxed out settings in the cet menu, i mean, thats stunning, and the lightning then is close to photorealism. But it IS making the game crash, and it IS taxing.

As far as I can tell, even a 4090, can be brought onto its knees, with such extreme path tracing. Maybe the 5000 series from nvidia, or maybe even the 6000 series will change this, but for now, the 4090 is the best card there is, followed by the 4080 super, the 4080, the 4070 ti super, the 4070 ti, and the 4070 itself, and ofcourse after that the 4060 series.

But it is what it is, and accept that. Also keep in mind that most likely the path tracing in 2.1 and above is just not implemented correctly by cdpr, as unfortunate it is to say and admit.

But... Ray tracing itself comes close to what path tracing does, and gives you a much more stable game, at least that is what it did for me.

So, if you managed to get to the end of this guide, thank you for reading, and let me know if this helped you as well to get a more stable game back.

If it didn't help, also please let me know, and maybe i still can figure something out to help you.

For now this was it

Cheers, Mara