Cyberpunk 2077 patch 1.10 / 1.11 – Has the game improved on PS4 and Xbox One? • Eurogamer.net

CD Projekt RED promised a major patch for Cyberpunk 2077 in January and the studio duly delivered, version 1.10 promising a series of bug fixes, stability improvements and – for PlayStation 4 at least – the promise of upgrades from actual performance. And this is crucial because we have absolutely no doubts that crashes can be fixed and issues removed, but the fundamental issue is, does the latest-gen hardware have the power to deliver performance? consistent performance level much closer to the 30 fps target? The performance review of version 1.10 gives us some optimism in some areas, but there is still a mountain to climb.

Of course, version 1.10 has since been updated with patch 1.11, which basically provides a hotfix update to fix a few bugs, but the main optimization and stability push introduced improvements to memory management. and fixed a wide range of bugs. What’s curious are the platform-specific optimizations: we’re talking crowd optimization for PS4 Pro and PlayStation 5, but the base PS4 should surely get better too? And why wouldn’t these optimizations also improve the situation for Xbox One users. For its part, the Microsoft platform has seen changes in memory management, especially around the creation of characters, mirrors, digitization of cameras and much more.

Oddly enough, our tests suggest that there are other improvements – and since it’s the vanilla PS4 and Xbox One that really need a lot of work, these are the platforms that we initially chose to look at. Something we can report right away: We haven’t seen the game crash, lock, or revert to the front-end at all. That’s not to say that we didn’t run into some issues and bugs – we certainly did – but cleaning up crashing issues and delivering a more stable experience is probably CD Projekt RED’s number one goal. Obviously our testing is limited to a small area of ​​the game, but we see this as a significant advancement for the game.

While playing on the standard PlayStation 4, we also noticed a few improvements that don’t seem to have been revealed in the patch notes. First of all, the image quality seems to be significantly improved. Even with the compressed video you’ll see on this page, the increase in clarity here should be obvious – maybe CDPR tweaked the render engine’s temporal anti-aliasing component, improved post-TAA sharpness. or reduce the intensity of the post-processing pipeline. Either way, it looks cleaner. Getting a lock on native resolution in this game is a challenge due to how quickly the pixel count changes, but our impression is that the actual render resolution remains unchanged from the launch code – Cyberpunk 2077 just looks better. clean.

In some scenarios, we also noticed an improvement in performance on PS4 – up to five or six frames per second, which is quite an achievement, a significant jump in percentage terms. Interestingly, we’ve seen this happen in scenarios like the vehicle shootout with the scavengers after the first mission – where the crowd system optimization announced by CDPR likely didn’t have an impact. Again, the picture quality remains clearer and the effect suite remains the same, so this is a real step forward. But it is clear that we are still far from a pleasant experience. Other areas of the game are essentially functioning the same as before, and performance issues persist. In the frenetic shootouts, it’s still possible for Cyberpunk 2077 to dive below 20 fps on PlayStation 4, while the streaming issues are still present. It is still very difficult to recommend this game to users of the most popular console of the last generation.

Where does version 1.10 leave the Xbox One S? Well, it looks like the improvement in picture clarity seen on PlayStation 4 also applies to the vanilla Xbox One, but beyond the overall stability improvements not all of our test clips did. revealed no noticeable performance improvements over patch 1.02. The often prolonged stuttering is gone, the stability improvements are also present, but the way the game plays out remains as unsatisfactory as before. Xbox is also where I ran into a particularly major issue – and one issue I’d like to see the CDPR address is how playing on one type of Xbox can impact the experience if you upgrade to another. For example, if you’re playing Series X in quality mode, switching to Xbox One or Xbox One X drops frame rates to around 15 fps. This can only be fully resolved by clearing all game saves from the affected Xboxes. I’ll let you watch the video to see some of the other weird bugs and weird issues that I’ve encountered on both platforms.

Similar to our work on The Witcher 3, we aim to chart the progress of the various Cyberpunk 2077 fixes and upgrades over time, so after completing the work on the base machines, our gaze shifts to the improved consoles. . In our initial testing, the PS4 Pro – while still showing serious issues in some scenarios – seemed like the choice of the bunch when it came to playing the game on last-gen systems. However, impressions so far suggest that beyond the stability improvements, it’s still the same experience overall – our test cases involving crowds (an area chosen by the CDPR as the focus of optimization work in version 1.10) showed inconclusive results, and certainly no significant improvement. .

Ultimately, what we take away from Cyberpunk 2077 patch 1.10 – and even 1.11 – is pretty straightforward. Steps have been taken to eliminate game crashes and improve overall stability – the kind of fundamental improvement that should prevail, but although there are some improvements in the way the game works (on a PS4 basis at least ), that doesn’t answer the question we got when we saw the very first demo: is it actually possible to run it smoothly on a PlayStation 4 or Xbox One? On the PS4 side, it feels like some real improvements have been made – but at the same time, if there were any fundamental optimizations here, I would have expected to see some sort of improvement on the Pro side as well.

Based on previous PR, CDPR’s plan is to deliver another major fix in February, so we will report this as the upgrade arrives.