*AMD Ryzen Users – Check out the Sidebar Section at the end*
After many months of deferred releases, tireless nights and days by CDPR’s dev team and fever pitch excitement from fans, it’s finally here. CD Projekt RED’s arguably most ambitious, technically impressive and anticipated game ever, Cyberpunk 2077 graces our displays and has landed with quite a splash.
Interest was so high that Cyberpunk set a new record on it’s very first day in circulation, Highest Number of Concurrent Players in a Single Player Game on Steam, doubling the previous record holder Fallout 4. SteamDB.info had been charting the player count and saw a high of over one million players concurrently playing Cyberpunk 2077 within hours of its midnight launch on December 10th. This is seriously impressive, – especially when you consider that not only would people be playing on Steam, but also GoG Galaxy, Epic Games Store and Consoles, so the true peak number would be even higher.
CDPR already had a sizeable 43GB Day One patch out when the game broke cover and went live to the masses. By and large performance and optimization on PC appears to be very good, it’s certainly a game that can give your PC a workout, 4K Ultra RT without DLSS still being a bit much for the current gen of hardware, DLSS really being an asset. AMD have yet to come out with their own answer to Nvidia’s DLSS, which certainly reduces the burden on the GPU when running at demanding settings.
This truly is a next gen title, and is really best experienced on next gen hardware that can let REDengine4 stretch it’s muscles and impress. The lighting, the detail, the character models, and especially the facial animations are decidedly next gen. it’s clear that CDPR poured all their effort into making the game world feel lived in and vibrant.
Even when played without RT, the global illumination on show is shockingly convincing. While the accuracy and detail is of course stronger in shadows with RT on, if you’re using graphics cards that can only handle rasterization, you’re still in for a great time. The world feels authentic, futuristic, gritty, dystopic while fascinating.
It’s really a game that scales well with increasing GPU power specifically, the more you can chuck at it the more it’ll reward you with some enthralling visual feasts, getting yourself a high res OLED with HDR being just an exceptional way to experience the world.
While commendable that CDPR has gone through the painstaking effort to cater to last gen hardware, it seems at least at present that CyberPunk 2077 is really designed for multicore modern CPUs, NVMe SSDs and High End GPUs. The last gen console experience in particular is very lacking at the moment, with a dynamic resolution that in the case of the Base PS4 can waver down to 720p and in demanding situations, a frame rate of 15fps that would be more akin to old late life PS3 games, it’s really a shame considering how impressive CyberPunk 2077 is when it’s given the right hardware to do it’s thing, Digital Foundry have a phenomenal comparative analysis that I’d recommend anyone considering buying the game on last gen look at before pulling the trigger, link in the description below.
Updates do seem to be coming out fast n’ furious in CDPR typical style, which is great to see them continuing their steadfast commitment to bettering their games like they did with the Witcher 3. Launch bugs and performance issues are always expected to some degree with games so complex, and it does seem that CDPR are being very active in remedying the initial teething issues and rough edges that have accompanied the launch.
Of course, any mention of Cyberpunk would be a disservice if we didn’t mention Keanu Reeves rendition of Johnny Silverhand. Reeve’s acting prowess is on full display here, a great choice for the role at hand. Cyberpunk is one of those games that needs to be experienced, the less you know going in the better. We’ll have some further impressions soon in a follow up review along with some performance tests on fairly high spec gaming laptops and desktops to test out the scaling for ourselves, keep tuned!
References: Digital Foundry Video – Cyberpunk 2077: PS4 vs PS4 Pro Frame-Rate Tests – Can Consoles Run Cyberpunk?
Link: https://www.digitalfoundry.net/2020-12-10-cyberpunk-2077-ps4-vs-ps4-pro-frame-rate-tests-can-consoles-run-cyberpunk
*Sidebar*
There’s been a few reports of a bug in Cyberpunk 2077 running on SMT enabled AMD Ryzen processors, where the game seems to not be SMT Aware, loading up only the physical cores and not addressing the CPU’s logical cores, potentially causing some performance issues.
It seems that it’s easily resolvable by editing some Hex values in the game executable, which you can do by the below process, credit to videocardz.com and Reddit user UnhingedDoork for raising awareness of the issue and how to fix it:
Step by Step:
- Download HxD hex editor
- Find your Cyberpunk2077.exe, i have GOG so mines was in Cyberpunk 2077binx64
- Make a backup copy of Cyberpunk2077.exe just in case
- Drag Cuberpunk2077.exe to HxD, a bunch of hex numbers should appear (like 01 FF 0D, etc)
- Press CTRL+F, change column to Hex-Values
- Put in “75 30 33 C9 B8 01 00 00 00 0F A2 8B C8 C1 F9 08” in the search string without quotes, those values should be highlighted
- Copy “EB 30 33 C9 B8 01 00 00 00 0F A2 8B C8 C1 F9 08” without quotes
- Back in HxD right click the highlighted values and select “paste insert”
- Now go to top bar and click the save icon logo
A video guide of how to do this is also available here: https://streamable.com/jpx652
https://videocardz.com/newz/cyberpunk-2077-gets-fps-boost-with-a-patch-for-amd-ryzen-cpus
We’ve reached out to CDPR for comment and will share any info as it comes in.
