How to Download Cyberpunk 2077 on PC and Start Playing

72 GB, the 2.3 build with Phantom Liberty included, and the graphics options that decide whether Night City runs smoothly on your card.

Cyberpunk 2077 arrives at 72 GB in version 2.3, with the Phantom Liberty storyline and the reworked combat, police and driving systems already part of the package. It lives in the Games section of the catalog, and like the rest of the builds there it is pre-installed, meaning you unpack a finished folder instead of running a setup wizard.

Check your machine first

• Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit, with a six-core processor.
• 16 GB of RAM. Night City streams a lot of geometry, and 8 GB machines stutter during driving regardless of the GPU.
• A graphics card with 6 GB of VRAM for 1080p at high settings. Ray tracing needs more headroom on top of that.
• Roughly 150 GB free during unpacking, and an SSD. This is one of the games where a mechanical drive is genuinely painful.

Download and unpack

1. Open the Cyberpunk 2077 item page from the Games section and download the archive from the button at the top.
2. Verify the size against the item page while the download runs. Partial archives are the usual source of extraction errors.
3. Extract to a plain path such as D:\Games\Cyberpunk2077 with 7-Zip or WinRAR. Avoid the desktop and the Windows drive if it is nearly full.
4. Do not interrupt the extraction. If it stops, delete the partial folder and start over from the archive rather than reusing what is left.

Getting a good frame rate

1. Launch the game and let the first-run shader compilation finish. It takes several minutes on the first start and looks like a freeze otherwise.
2. Set the preset to High, then enable DLSS, FSR or XeSS on Quality. Upscaling buys more performance than any other single setting here.
3. Turn ray tracing on only with the Performance upscaling preset. Reflections are the most expensive ray-traced effect, and local shadows are the cheapest.
4. Crowd density and cascaded shadow resolution are the two options to lower for a steady frame rate in busy districts.
5. Cap the frame rate to a value your machine holds consistently. A locked 60 feels better than an average of 70 with drops.

First hours in Night City

Finish the prologue and the first act before you wander off, because the lifepath choices and the early ripperdoc upgrades only unlock after it. Pick a weapon class early: blades, smart guns and netrunning scale very differently, and spending attribute points across all three leaves you weak at the point where the story missions get harder. Visit a ripperdoc as soon as you can afford a cyberdeck or subdermal armour.

Troubleshooting

If the game crashes to desktop during the first minutes, update the GPU driver and confirm that Visual C++ redistributables are current. Save file corruption after an interrupted shutdown is rare but fixable: keep a copy of the save folder under the user profile, which is also what you need before a version bump. Texture pop-in that never resolves usually means the install is sitting on a slow drive, not a settings problem.