Cyberpunk 2077’s 1.2 patch arrived last week, accompanied by an absolutely huge list of bug fixes, tweaks, and upgrades. Dedicated players need to see game-breaking errors addressed, but is the game fundamentally fixed on consoles? Can we now recommend that you buy the title on the latest generation systems? To chase, there is good news for PlayStation 4 Pro owners, but in terms of performance and stability, there is still a long, long way to go.
What the patch notes do not detail is a particular push to optimize the experience for the PS4 and Xbox One generation consoles, although there is a long list of engine-specific optimizations that in theory should enhance the experience for everyone. users. There are also promised improvements for the controversial temporal anti-aliasing solution, plus improved screen space reflection. Xbox One is also singled out for memory management optimization – but these are the streamlining we’ve noticed, as it’s the key to dramatic improvements to the title on PlayStation 4 Pro.
It’s all about background flow technology – the way assets such as geometry and textures are brought from storage, decompressed and then rendered on screen. We’ve seen the change on PS4, PS4 Pro and Xbox One, but oddly enough, it seems that Xbox One X hasn’t changed much from version 1.1. Simply put, there is the sense that streaming may be running at a lower priority than before, which aims at improving frame rate to solve detail. Environmental assets take longer to load, pop-in is now more of a problem than it was before. You can say that there are delays with streaming, but details do give finally, given time. However, in dense urban areas while driving fast, some aspects of the area can now not charge at all until it passes you.
Digital Foundry tests all latest console versions of Cyberpunk 2077 patch 1.2.
You can see in the video how it affects the overall presentation, especially on PlayStation 4 Pro, but the result is that there are clear benefits to performance. Sony’s improved console has always made the game the best, and even knocked out the more powerful Xbox One X. Now it’s even better and spends a lot of its time reaching its target 30 frames per second. By running a crowded market, the rate could reach the lowest to mid 20s on PS4 Pro. With the new patch installed, the game ran at an almost flawless 30 fps – though the reduction (or rather the delay) in detail I’ve already talked about. Sometimes performance in similar scenarios – like a fast lightning through the market – improves to 8 fps for Pro on patch 1.2, a remarkable upgrade for a 30 fps title. It’s more streamlined, and although it takes a visual sacrifice to get there, I would say it’s worth it for mere playability. The pop-in occurs in fast-moving scenes anyway, and so practically speaking, it is often the case that it sweeps past vaguely as it runs.
I think the most remarkable of the tests is to see the infamous alley shoot. This is a stress test I came up with when the game was launched – on the way to the Ripperdoc we drive fast through Night City, and rather than park in the indicated lock, we’re actually actually going to have a murderous rampage. The combination of battles, multiple NPCs and dense city details drops performance on all systems – and it still does on PS4 Pro, but it’s clearly still improved over version 1.1. There are still a few issues – with later calls against the Maelstromers, my console started to spin quite badly in the twenties before I experienced a complete collision. So it’s clear there’s still room for improvement, and despite the huge gains on the PS4 Pro rate, it’s hard to give the game a place to sleep on patch 1.2 if it’s still an issue.
We managed the computer version of Cyberpunk 2077 on a system based on an Xbox One processor and the results were fascinating.
However, there are major issues with Xbox One X. There are some performance improvements. The market operations are now in their mid-20s rather than teenagers, while the initial entry into Night City after the first mission is also being improved. The problem is that many of the legacy issues persist: Xbox One X still suffers from brackets – big hangups in the game – causing major hurdles to 0fps. This is short-lived, but still a problem that occurs more frequently on Xbox One machines. Unlike PS4 consoles, I did not crash in my tests. Overall, the enhancement of One X is less impressive and it’s still possible to see performance drop below 20 fps by simply overtaking dense environments quickly – an area where PS4 Pro sees dramatic improvements. The stress test against alley seems to be going just as badly as in version 1.1. Overall, there is improvement, but it’s not nearly as high-performance as the PS4 Pro – a strange state of affairs.
As for the vanilla PS4 and Xbox One, it has consistently performed poorly with Patch 1.1, and although the new patch makes some scenes play out a little better, an advantage of 2 fps to 3 fps makes it less likely if you are still that far away is of the 30fps target. Oddly enough, PS4 shows nothing of the same improvement as the Pro does – it’s still a great 20-30fps experience in shootouts (or worse), complete with hooks and drops. It’s a struggle to even properly aim with this issue during any gun. I also experienced a crash on the system menu on Ps4 – just like Pro. PS4 is generally still a bad experience: the crash is still there and the performance on the baseline is still far from the point.
Here’s what Digital Foundry made of the 1.1 patch of Cyberpunk 2077 in January.
Meanwhile, Xbox One is still very difficult to recommend. The stream optimizations are included, based on similar traversal footage comparing dots 1.1 to 1.2, but the performance gains are slim at best – and too small to register in most scenes, where frame rates show only a margin of error. Where you really need a good, consistent level of performance, Xbox One continues to disappoint, and perhaps inevitably, it remains the version of Cyberpunk that performs the worst.
Finally, there is good and bad news here. PlayStation 4 Pro is not bad. The assumption that a game that is clearly and distinctly designed for the next generation of hardware will struggle on the last generation of machines suggests the idea of playing Cyberpunk 2077 at 30 fps, for much of the experience, that it is not the game in the form of an old hardware is not. completely impossible. Based on this, I would be fascinated to see how it improves the situation for PlayStation 5 working on the same code base. With that said, the fact that both PS4 and Pro crashed into the system menus within two hours of the game is a pretty brutal reminder that a lot of work is still needed on this game.
And it’s a sentiment that makes even more money for PS4, Xbox One and Xbox One X. Four months after its launch, it appears that only baby steps were taken to improve the core performance of the game on these three. Based on the patch notes, troubleshooting seems to be preferred – and rightly so – but hopefully CDPR will continue to pursue the optimization. What we see in spot 1.2 is progress, but it’s weird that only PS4 Pro saw improvements in my tests. Fingers crossed that it extends to all systems when the next big patch arrives.