Cyberpunk Phantom Liberty/2.0: Bad PC performance? It might not be your GPU

The Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 update as well as the Phantom Liberty expansion pack have significantly changed CPU performance in the game. There is also now an AMD Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) setting available under the gameplay options which can affect CPU performance. Ray tracing also puts an additional burden on the CPU. In this video we look at CPU limited performance on a variety of CPUs and also explore how the AMD SMT button affects performance as well as other game settings like crowd density and Ray Tracing, including RT Overdrive.
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[@danielowentech]

I didn't have time to timestamp sections before leaving for work, sorry!

[@pem3480]

Thanks again for another great vid!

[@davidbrennan5]

No worries, your channel is great.

[@tlmoller]

Work, work, work,,,, 😂

[@George_K.]

Hey Daniel, it's quite jarring when you're moving your camera frame to align your pointing finger. It's a cool idea, but it makes it harder for me to focus since so much more than your finger starts moving around. I think it wouldn't be an issue if your hand was filling up the whole camera shot or you used pointing hand cutouts to pin on the image, or even good old green marker highlights/circles. Just a few ideas to keep the criticism healthy. Thanks for your work making another solid video, they are always on point and I wish more tech media was paying attention to the increasingly cognizant topic of CPU binds and utilization.

[@mathewbriggs6667]

My brother has a i7 8700k and he just got the game with everything absolutely maxed out and path tracing on max with rtx set to psycho it is not the bottleneck the rtx 3090 is at 1440p

[@bearwynn]

@18:30 I am a game developer, and you're kinda most of the way there. Games and programs in general are sequential, we can only do things in the correct order. So even though we split up a task into other threads, it's not necessarily one task being split up and is instead a set of tasks being split up. 30 people walking around can be split into 30 threads, but each thread would only be one person walking. You can't make 1 person walking be split up into 30 threads. The way we often say it is "having 30 chefs doesn't mean the cake bakes in the oven faster". There's also the fact that if a thread is using data, it's not like anything else can use that data. In order to use that data there has to be a lock put onto it to stop another thread changing it mid process etc. This can cause all kinds of headaches. the "putting it back together again" at the end is indeed an issue though. Especially when other code is waiting for ALL of the threads to finish before it can actually do its task. So it's still going to have to wait for the slowest member of the group to finish before it can proceed. This is a whole lot easier when each frame doesn't have to be done within 16ms. In direct response to the topic of the game not using more than 16 threads, you're pretty much right. It's just diminishing returns really.

[@AtakenSmith]

I have started to watch you for some time and I have to praise your "style" of moving yourself around, it's helps a lot to follow you and your way of talking about it is great too, thank you and good job!

[@Varil92]

It's crazy how CPU-intensive games are becoming nowadays.

[@jakedill1304]

It's nice to see somebody actually use it for a real reason this time.. or at least a plausible one anyways..

[@toad7395]

Honestly with how gpu-intensive most games are, being cpu-intensive is a good thing sometimes

[@molochi]

People have be complaining for years that games only used a few cores. Well they fixed that, now they use all the cores (well 16T anyways) at 100%.

[@lucam.6007]

because we believed to the lie that 8 cores were enough

[@higgsbosonfan7701]

Battle Royals have always been crazy CPU intensive, especially Fortnite. Bad CPU performance is something I'm familiar with and it's so much more frustrating than a GPU bottleneck.

[@justmf]

It will be interesting to see how Intel cpus with the big/little architecture handles this

[@DarkEnigma1115]

0:00 Intro 1:02 Ryzen 5 5600 Performance Patch 1.6 vs 2.0 2:18 GPU Busy showing CPU Limited Performance 3:11 New AMD SMT Setting On/Off 5:26 CPU Bottleneck Pt.2 (1080p Ultra vs Low) 7:04 Crowd Density FPS Performance 8:30 Ray Tracing FPS Performance 11:20 System Requirements 12:48 5950X Comparative Testing Disclaimers 14:59 5950X SMT On/Off 17:14 Theorizing on SMT On/Off performance for 5950X 18:52 7800X3D Comparative Testing Disclaimers 19:12 7800X3D SMT On/Off 21:00 Conclusion

[@ujjvalw2684]

w

[@abxknight1386]

U da 🐐

[@sidvanhound]

Thanks. Skipped to conclusion, no help at all. Saved me 25 Mins.

[@josu91ita]

​@@sidvanhoundif you struggle cpu just disable RT, or reduce it, low crowd density and auto cpu performance stp

[@idkwhattohaveasausername5828]

Glad I’m not the only one. Thought I was going crazy. Game still runs fine at high with quality FSR 2.1 on my system but I have noticed that I’m cpu limited much more than I was before and do occasionally dip below 60 though it’s rare

[@nicholasdavidson1191]

I was consistently getting 30 with everything on Ultra including RT, and quality DLSS. But in the new area, I'm seeing constant dips into the low 20s and stuttering.

[@Jason_Bover9000]

Im definitely not buying this i played on series x I was happy

[@ajaxtv8172]

going below 55 fps from 100 fps is making me go crazy with this monitor it feels like the game running at 20fps , i had to buy rthe game on the ps5 because it seems that stays at 60 fps stable even in dogtown and i cant afford to buy ryzen 7 series yet

[@ajaxtv8172]

@@Jason_Bover9000 def playing in the ps5 this game is not running well on my ryzen 3600

[@Under2077]

@@nicholasdavidson1191ya, RT has to go for this dlc

[@valkenhayn412]

"I prob just blinded you with the white background, deal with it, anyway.." LMAO

[@Yogensia]

Thanks for the context when talking about each testing setup, helps know much better where the numbers come from. Your attention to detail is greatly appreciated, keep it up! 👍

[@ethanh20009]

Perfect!!!! Exactly the content I was looking for regarding the SMT option. Can trust Daniel to deliver!

[@ZoMbIEx23x]

I would not have thought to look in "Gameplay" for any kind of performance setting. Thank you for this!

[@ZeroZingo]

Once again you prove yourself Daniel. Really good material, answers a lot of questions. You need to take this to Intel, they should be honored to sponsor you with a combo.

[@philiphansen1103]

Glad you brought this up. I noticed straight away with the 2.0 update. Thought maybe it was my system at first

[@davemeredith6964]

I rarely watch KZbin but I quite like the raw nature of your videos Dan. Off the cuff, with knowledge... I have had great results with an 11th gen I7. 4080, 32gb of DDR4 RAM. With path tracing , maxed out visual options and game capped at 90fps,Quality DLSS and with Frame Gen. I can push over 100 if I uncap. If I go native 4K I average 75-80fps with the same as above but DLSS performance. Zero streaming issues either. Very consistent for me.

[@faultier1158]

I have a i7 9770k and am using the path tracing mode with active frame generation while fps capped to 57 (to reduce input lag), and still running into the CPU limit quite often. Not most of the time, but often enough for it to be annoying. My internal frame rate being so low means that the game immediately becomes almost unplayable when I'm hitting the CPU limit. Apparently my CPU is already old.😅

[@fabiomamen]

I was not getting the performance i hoped for with my 3090 on this game...this explains a lot, thanks

[@DanteMav]

Now i know why my cyberpunk getting a lil stuttering when moving around. Thanks Daniel for this amazing video u made ! keep doing what u love !

[@miguelzl5228]

after all this, frame generation did make a difference on my experience with a 5600x, 32ram, b350 (am still on first gen ryzen mobo lol) and 4070 a 1080p, always above 80fps, you can still feel those 40 ish frames but not as much, was thinking of upgrading the whole platform to a 7700x for starfield an this but... honestly i play just fine with what i have now and am enjoying like a child

[@pyxNewWorld]

can you post all your graphics settings? planning on playing 1080p with a 4070 with similar specs

[@miguelzl5228]

@@pyxNewWorld everything on high, dlss quality, fg on, no dynamic resolution, raytracing all on and lighting ultra, no path tracing, i play the whole game 100+ fps, closed areas 150+, except for the big open areas of the dlc (there the framerate drops to 80-ish) everything else runs as i said, everything feels smooth and looks great. I feel that if you have a b550 you can probably turn on path tracing, my b350 was never the best and the pcie 3.0 is starting to cause trouble here, excuse my english, not my first language

[@pyxNewWorld]

@@miguelzl5228 looks great, thank you.

[@IceBreakBottle]

7700x would be a silly upgrade. Go a 5800x3d or 7800x3d

[@miguelzl5228]

@@IceBreakBottle the 7700x is better for my tipe of work tho, i might just wait for the next gen of cpus maybe even 2 gens if a find a good deal on a good b550 or x570

[@sobakabazuka8024]

It also looks like the setting - slow hard drive mode improves CPU performance.

[@troy1993]

I love how when I first bought this game I had a ryzen 3 3100 and now 3 years later I have a 5600x and get the same performance as the ryzen 3 3100 before the 2.0 update. And I just bought the 5600x, now between starfield and cyberpunk I feel like it was a horrible purchase. 😭

[@craciunator99]

I was using a 2600x until this juneish, and its definitely better, problem is im still using a 1070 but a new card worthwhile upgrade is like 200-250 for something like a 3060 and I dont game enough to justify it, but starfield is basically unplayable at 1080p with a 1070

[@radicalxg8282]

Did the same but i dont feel bad because i know is an optimization thing, the rest of releases this years runs fine

[@DraconicA5]

The medium setting is good enough for Starfield and Cyperpunk. I play Starfield on HDR Oled at medium settings, and it looks surprisingly beautiful. A good monitor is better than investing in high-end PC specs in the long run.

[@johnyaruki734]

buy ryzen 7 5800x3d and sell the 5600x

[@craciunator99]

@@johnyaruki734 Yeah man I cant just afford to do that. And frankly I dont care enough, I need a better gpu before cpu.

[@Neonmirrorblack]

Well this sucks. Currently playing my Cyberpunk restart and I haven't yet gotten to any of the Phantom Liberty content. I'm using a 9600K and a 3080, playing at 1440p. Even with the base game I noticed some odd CPU utilization that wasn't present prior to 2.0 which was bottlenecking performance (dipping to the mid 50s) in some areas, and it looks like even G-Sync won't save it with the Phantom Liberty stuff. It's good that this was brought to my attention though, because I recently looked at some benchmarks of the 9600K vs the 13600K and it really wasn't worth upgrading for a 22% increase in performance. But it was with games that were not using eight plus cores. Was going to do a full system build next fall, and then decided not to due to Nvidia stalling their next gen of GPUs, but I might reconsider it if enough CPU intensive games (that I actually want to play) release between now and then.

[@casualmime2792]

Great analysis as usual. Good thing cpus are inexpensive. Definitely sucks if you have a pc that's hard to rebuild tho. Path tracing and ray reconstruction look incredible. Probably the best looking game I've played period especially in dark scenes.

[@JO-hs1ue]

Dark rooms look so realistic it's insane. A lot of ppl who are viewing livestreams of this game are complaining that it's so dark, but they don't understand how good it looks in person. Some areas of this game, especially areas you visit during the main story look 100% real.

[@11cat123]

At the very least if you are stuck at am4 a 5800x3d atleast on my rig is good enough to not bottleneck a 4090 on rt overdrive mode at a 4k output. In fact I have yet to find a point where I am cpu limited where as even pre-patch I was often cpu limited on my older 5600x.

[@JO-hs1ue]

@@11cat123 exact same setup. Cyberpunk runs great

[@dawienel1142]

@@11cat123 5800x3D+RTX3080TI main system here, gonna run HUB's optimized guide and will maybe touch the RT reflections, but want to try and keep my FPS above 90 while allowing for some eye candy, glad to see my CPU is still performing well, probably won't be able to hit 90's in CPU heavy areas, but can't wait to test it out. I won't be able to touch 4K though, probably 1440p with DLSS quality for me. 😞 Still one of the best looking games out there even at 1440p so can't complain too much. 🙂 My CPU is undervolted with the PBO2 app and locks to 4450MHz in all my games and even runs 4420MHz in 100% all core workloads with 32GB 3600MHz CL16 tuned RAM so can't wait to see how well it runs here, my 3080TI is also OC'd with a healthy undervolt, but I'm not expecting much from it in this game, still probably under a stock 3090.

[@DarkEnigma1115]

@@11cat123 4k shouldn't really bottleneck any CPU from the last 5 years. Edit: I think GPUs are at the point of being CPU bottlenecked at 1440p though.

[@jakedill1304]

We finally got a multi-threaded engine and they say they're not going to use it anymore... I really hope that's not the case.

[@Accuaro]

0:21 There is no way a 3080 is comparable to a 7900XTX for normal raster..

[@IlMufficida]

That's because Cyberpunk is not a properly made game but an nVidia techdemo used to make their gimmicky features look good and a must have

[@oldmanskin8554]

@@IlMufficidalol as far as I know gta5 still has better AI a 10 year old game

[@NotDumbassable]

Hey, apparently there is a method to use Ray Reconstruction with lower tiers of RT instead of Path Tracing, would appreciate it if you took a look at how the various tiers of RT look with Ray Reconstruction enabled.

[@user-ck9cw8fs5n]

second this

[@Deliveredmean42]

So I heard it's not recommended since it's straight up Bork at the time some tried it the other day.

[@Deliveredmean42]

For the official Path Tracing one, yes. But the modded Ray Tracing one does have more issues last time I heard.@m0rianne

[@AlejandroJorqueraZ]

with the 5950X the SMT hurls performance because of the latency between CCDs. The setting distributes the CPU load over all the cores and this requires fast communication among them, but when a core in CCD 1 has to talk to a core at CCD 2, there is an extra delay caused by the infinity fabric's speed limitation. In 8-core CPUs such as the 5800X or 7800X, there is only 1 CCD and a unified cache, so the core-core communication is as fast as possible. This is why the 7950X3D has extra cache on 1 CCD only and AMD also uses the Xbox game software on windows to redirect the game's CPU load to this one, to maximize performance and minimize latency penalties.

[@h1tzzYT]

"with the 5950X the SMT hurts performance because of the latency between CCDs" You mixed up few things and also CCD latency most of the time does not effect gaming perf in negative way. First of all, SMT ON hurts 5950x in this game because of "context-switching", essentially what it means is that windows scheduler takes more time assigning jobs for each cpu thread longer than actually executing them, thus creating extra overhead and worse performance. If game could utilize more cpu threads than 16, it will most likely improve performance with SMT ON, because now there are more "workers" than available cpu cores, so with SMT ON feature, additional cpu threads will most likely help. Now the dual CCD latency does not effect cpus most of the time as windows schedules vast majority of games on its first CCD anyway, and in other cases when both ccd's are utilized it actually increases performance, due to additional cores and cache on secondary CCD. It is quite rare when 5950x performs slower than 5800x, in most cases its either the same or 5950x has like 10-20% better perf. in 1% lows and 0.1% lows, maybe a bit higher AVG on top. The theory that unified cache of 3800x/5800x/7700x being objectively superior performer in games than its dual CCD counterpart (3950x/5950x/7950x) is mostly a myth, because it's mostly supported by outliers rather than overwhelming majority of cases. 7900x3d/7950x3d is different case since they are hybrid and asymmetrical cpus unlike 3950x/5950x/7950x, so assigning same game on both CCD's becomes quite troublesome and may lead to stuttering and other perf issues.

[@GoonyMclinux]

No it doesn't, it runs fine.

[@GoonyMclinux]

​@@h1tzzYTThese guys talk after watching a video or reading a crap post and not understanding it. Most of them probably built 1 or 2 computers and have little technical experience other than remote observation and theory so please forgive all the village idiots.

[@ojonathan]

Yes, although the Core-to-Core latency between two CCDs is not that high (normally something around 79ns), there's an additional problem, for example, let's say the Game Thread 1 is scheduled on CCD1 and then moved to CCD2, CCD2 now needs to go through Infinity Fabric to fetch data from the CCD1 and copy to the CCD2 L3 cache. Now this Game Thread 1 is scheduled again on the on CCD1. As long as the data is not modified, this is fine, but games do a lot of write operations to memory, and this means that CCD1 and CCD2 has to keep this data consistent across both caches using the MOESI protocol, and this incurs in a performance penalty, although small, it does affect frame rate. As for the L3 cache, it's not only to minimize latency, it's way more to avoid cache misses. If a thread that was previously on a CCD1 + 3D V-Cache, and goes to another CCD2 which also has a 3D V-cache (AMD has prototypes with 3D V-Cache on both CCDs), it will surely hit a lot of cache misses and have to fetch everything through Infinity Fabric, and even worse, deal with data coherency penalties across both L3 caches. You generally want the application to be Cache Resident. They stick to a single CCD and use this same cache for its entire lifetime.

[@AnomalyVoid]

I was replaying 2077 waiting for the DLC and yeah, I noticed a pretty big performance drop. I was 95% of the time rocksolid 60 fps at 2k using ultra and RT Ultra pre 2.0. Now I dip to 50's often even with DLSS running and I was using native before. I thought the new update would only bring improvements to fps but now I feel like my rig can't handle it when it did. I have to start dropping my graphic settings and it doesn't feel great. My CPU is on the weaker side but it just sucks that the update before worked much better for me.

[@JGupton93]

Agreed. It seems so out of place because from release, most patches had the intention to fix performance. Then this one comes out and hurts it. I'm torn because I'm legitimately having tons of fun with the new systems but incredibly irritated at how many times my Ryzen 7 3700x dips to the 40's-50's.

[@kannonfps]

@@JGupton93 maybe they will (i hope at least) release some patch's in the near future to help with performance, i was also really surprised by the FPS Drops i was getting when i never really had such issue before, i did not run extensive test with msi afterburner on to see exactly what causes this but overall even with "optimized" settings it still hurting my fps quite badly ... the one setting that feel like it has the highest impact as of now is really the crowd, from high to medium i've seen an improvement but not that big therefore i'd rather stay with the occasional drop but better crowd than medium which sometime feel kinda empty ...

[@ArkturusRX]

Same here, with 7900XTX i bought week ago, with 5900X and 32gigs of 3200 ram, cpu utilized about 40-60%, being cpu limited, GPU goes from 60-80%, with crowd on low, it goes up to 70-90% in heavy areas Edit: Crowd density from low to high, 99 avg fps to 71, turning SMT ON/OFF/Auto 95/99/100 fps, weird

[@kommissarleber8527]

I think I read in different publications that the SMT fix should be as per core count. 6 cores set to auto, 8-12 cores set to on, above 12 set to off. Strangely, there does seem to be a slight but still real difference between setting auto or on.

[@stefankoopmans2200]

So Auto is perhaps switching on the fly?, depending on the situation. I was also curious if Auto would switch to Off the majority of the time on a 12+ core CPU, but maybe does occasionally go On when a certain load is met. This would mean Auto could be the best setting for all scenarios ? Just curious

[@joejoey7272]

CDPR did a great job making the game look stunning and very playable on a medium spec PC yet still offering lots of eye candy for those with more powerful computers

[@kommissarleber8527]

I would think the best comparison would have been to see the performance of that 5600x and it's dependancy on AM4 versus a 7600x on AM5. Considering that both cpus are 6 cores but the generational uplift being very significant with the added bonus of faster DDR5 RAM and better performing AM5 motherboards. Also possibly faster M.2 drives.

[@user-lm3fm4cq5i]

In 1.6 driving around the 5600x got around 80fps average while the 7600x got 111 fps avg. ( Ultra RT settings 1080p ) In Cyberpunk the 7600x outperforms even the 5800x3D.

[@ipotato95]

Oh my gosh thank you. Between this and hardware unboxed GPU optimization guide this morning, super excited to tune some settings

[@Ladioz]

Im struggling to run the phantom menace dlc on my 7700 and 5800X3D. what settings do you suggest to tune?

[@Girugi]

Game dev here. It's not harder to split things off to more cores or not. The amount of work and the splits are likely not changing at all, meaning the syncing does not change, and if a thread is waiting on a sync, it will not stay in a spin lock/active waiting, so it's utilization numbers will go down. The reason you probably can se a bit of slowdown when you split things up on more cores are much more likely to do with cache and kernel level interrupts, making one thread stall others. It is likely happening no matter what, but it is happening at more points during one "job" if more threads run at the same time. As for cache, on AMD, different cores share the cache in different ways, depending on their physical layout. Performance can change from managing that. If two core that share cache access the same atomic variable, it will have less of an impact compared to if they didn't share cache. So it can be good to share cache at times. But, it can be bad in other. If more cores use the same cache for jobs that don't share memory, it means the cache will fill up and have more misses faster, making them run slower. So, in short. It's very complicated to do absolutely optimal threading, and these things are likely why you might see bad scaling even when the CPU gets work. (also, there are more factors, like virtual threads on the same physical core actually share busses, so if just one of them completely saturate for example the available SIMD instructions, it can turn in to stalls and waiting, and actually minimal parallel work... But that is a complicated thing to evaluate and explain)

[@itsTyrion]

"It's not harder to split things off to more cores" disagree

[@Girugi]

@@itsTyrion please read that as "not harder to split tasks that are already able to run in parallel off to more cores when it is available" . I am sure this game has more tasks than cores, and if it is anything like the projects I've worked on, it is very easy to get more worker threads to match more cores. So this is referring to that, and the rest of the comment is about why it might not run better even if you can decide it on more cores. If the cores didn't actually receive work, and the spitting was hard. We would see their utilization being low as well. Anyway, everything written here needs to be simplified. It's only a comment section on a video after all. Not a full-fledged programming discussion hub.

[@williamsrussell1]

Bad Devs blame everything other that it's game being broken

[@arny752]

my i3 10th gen processor really can't handle this game on dogtown at the Black Sapphire area where there is more crowds. Shooting them makes it worse

[@MattyP650]

6:21 forget the GPU busy function! Your CPU has been maxed out the whole time, that’s all the evidence we need! Thanks for the video, great work and much appreciated.

[@TheEnhas]

Dogtown regularly drops into the low 50's in performance mode on all three modern consoles, so it's clearly a CPU issue there too. I hope we get a patch or (on PC) at least eventually FSR 3 to smooth things out.

[@MasterCog999]

That was the funniest most flippant "Deal With It". Thank you, first genuine laugh all day.

[@cks2020693]

weirdly enough my rig is gpu limited with 11700f and 4070ti, my FPS went from 100+ to 80+ after 2.0 update with GPU usage 95%-99%, and playing with the graphic settings brought it back up to 100+, even though I was so sure my rig was gonna be cpu limited

[@oropher1234]

It heavily depends which area you are in of course. Try a marketplace, you most certainly are CPU limited there.

[@ASAPSauce]

11th gen has AVX-512 instruction set right? I've seen people who haven't had much performance impact move from 1.6 to 2.0.

[@trentbostwick8739]

i meet between high and ultra recommendations but why are the pop ups so bad and the crowd density nonexistent after the 2.0 update... its kinda upsetting. it makes driving boring. im just driving on an empty road and thats even if the road loads ahead of me... ive fallen off the map going to fast.

[@IceBreakBottle]

That face cam dragging drives my OCD nuts.

[@lflyr6287]

Daniel Owen : Cyberpunk 2077 is created on a graphic engine that started its development in 2010 and was finished completely in 2013/2014 and so was the game itself. Then it was put on a shelf as a fallen project until it was revived in 2021 and used as an RTX sponsored title for Nvidia. This game engine is based in DX 9.0c API and DX 11 API. They both only use 1 core efficiently. But this game having such requirenments only shows how Win 10 / 11 are bloatware OS-s and need many redundant cores to do the background countles spionage tasks tah constantly eat resources. This is because of this game needing one fast core completely free to be used efficiently and to have as fast clocks as possible. These requirenmenta qre exaggerated because they need to be due to above mentioned limitations of the game engine and todays OS-es.

[@daanw6270]

Dude what a fantastic breakdown. Subbed! I was so confused why my gpu was running at 60-80% and I was getting dips to low 40s fps. After turning on afterburner I saw my cpu was getting worked lol. I got a 5600x and now seriously considering to upgrade to a 5800x3d.

[@J0rdan912]

Take another step beyond 5800x3D (if there is one, I'm not AMD user), just to make sure you can grind over some unoptimized BS. But seriously, if you happy with 5600x in like 99% games, you probably shouldn't waste your time and money on 1% of badly optimized games.

[@daanw6270]

@@J0rdan912 5800x3d is probably the best cpu on the am4 platform, so sadly I can't really upgrade to anything better than that, at least as far as gaming is concerned. It does however offer quite a significant increase in fps in lots of games. I'm not going to buy one right now since I feel it's still a bit too expensive to justify, however once I upgrade my gpu in the future AND I decide to stay on the am4 platform for a couple more years AND the price has come down a bit, probably then I will buy one! You are right about that last part, I fully agree. Not gonna buy one just to play a cyberpunk DLC.

[@thetruth5232]

@@daanw6270 My 5800X3D Is heavily bottlenecking my downclocked and undervolted 7900 XTX at 1440p120. While my GPU is coasting in energy savings mode my CPU is fighting for it's life and running hot all the time. Kinda hate Cyberpunk at this point, lol. It's torturing high end hardware while the RED engine has issues from the PS1 era.

[@daanw6270]

@thetruth5232 Yeah, it sucks. Most games aren't like that, thankfully.

[@tw1tch09]

Love the thumbnail lol. You’re the best Dan

[@TheAndretfk]

the game is very CPU intensive now. it used only 15-25% CPU usage on update 1.61. then i stopped playing waiting for phantom liberty. now i got cpu bottleneck, hovering around 60-95% CPU usage. and my GPU usage rarely goes over 95% now. sometimes goes as low as 50%. also another thing that i experience is even though the fps on afterburner says 60-ish fps. sometimes it felt kinda choppy like 40 fps. and that happens when CPU usage was around 80-95%.

[@blackbeans8096]

This is exactly what I am experiencing. They even flexed that they are 'going to use' all of your cpu now. That's true and made dogtown to dogshit.

[@jag0506881]

That was the most hilarious 30 second start ever

[@Quotenwagnerianer]

This was pretty apparent to me in the beginning of Phantom Liberty as you fight your way to the President. The way performance tanks was only explainable with CPU limitation.

[@seanmaclean1341]

the nonchalant "i probably blinded you with a white background, deal with it" has me cheering for the Daniel Owen villian era

[@Rainbows4Blood]

I do have an explanation as to why SMT helps with lower core counts and seems to be detrimental on higher core counts. And I am going over things that some people might consider basic but I want to provide a complete picture. First of all, your explanation with why games cannot use an unlimited amount of threads is fairly correct. Games are made up from very complex and often asymmetrical algorithms that can only be split into parallel threads to a degree unlike, say, a large matrix multiplication which can be parallelized pretty much endlessly. So, this sets a limit onto how many threads a game can use, depending on implementation. For Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 this seems to be 16 threads. Now, it is important to understand what SMT does. SMT tells a core to run not one thread but two. This has two benefits. First, it reduces the overhead of the OS issuing a thread switch because this is handled entirely in hardware. And make no mistake, context switching is still one of the slowest things in modern x86 architectures so you want to avoid it as much as possible. Second, modern CPU cores have many different parts that can be used in parallel and putting two threads on one core allows the core to engage more of it's parts simultaneously, leading to better overall utilization of the silicon and allows both threads to progress. However, the drawback is that these logical threads are still not full cores. Two threads on one core have to share certain resources and thus it's not as fast as two independent cores. So, it's always beneficial to only run one thread / core if you can. And this leads to the crux of the issue. If you enable SMT on a 5950X Cyberpunk probably stops prioritizing real cores vs. logical threads and just schedules it's 16 threads wherever it can. This leads to some of those threads sharing the same core in SMT mode which is, as explained above, not as fast as using discreet cores. That's why the 5950X seems to have even a slight benefit of SMT set to off because it forces all 16 threads onto discreet cores. If the game were able to scale to 32 threads I am sure ,out would see the same benefits on a 5950X as on a 5800X.

[@Cocker_Spaniel]

Anyone here expereiencing low gpu usage? I am with a 3080 and use rt reflections and most of the time I have a gpu usage of 70-50% and reaching only 60-39 fps while in some instances the gpu goes up to 99-95% and the fps goes up to 90-75 fps. Meaning the 3080 can run the game with rt reflections and high-ultra settings at 80 fps easily. I hope it’s a problem from their side and can be fixed. Gpu rtx 3080 cpu 5900x. Resolution setting - 1440p

[@darthsnarf]

im so glad i invested in a nice cpu when i built my pc 2 years ago the cpu is going to become critical to running new games in the next 2 years or so on wards

[@kathleendelcourt8136]

I highly doubt a 7900X would beat a 7800X3D even in this game, I don't think CDPR has tested those two CPUs. The 7900X just matches a 7700X in gaming so I don't think it can even touch the 7800X3D. Adding more threads beyond 16 shouldn't do anything as you showed in the video.

[@born2serve92]

even a 7700x is a lot for this game compared to release

[@schnitzel_enjoyer]

Yeah the game is now unplayable on an i5 9th gen. How are they not getting sued for changing the system requirements of a game.

[@undifinder6643]

Dogtown area tow nearly maximum amount of CPU usage for my laptop 13700HX + 4070 making DLSS+RT+RR mode so unstable for me with lots of hiccup because of bottleneck. The only way I play the game smoothly in Dogtown is at least DLAA with some optimized settings tweak 70-100 FPS, and yet there's still major stutter every few minutes driving around Dogtown.

[@Hayden_M_Kearney]

I’m running a 6800xt (1025mV) with a 5600x and getting 75 locked at 1440 with “ultra” preset and “medium” crowd density (no rt). Been having a blast, hope everyone gets to enjoy the game!

[@brzimtrco6142]

RAM timings matter, I had 3200mhz cl 16 and with 5600x in SOTTR I averaged 193fps in the benchmark, while being cpu bound. Now I have another kit 3600cl16 which i have overclocked to 3733cl16 and tightened the timings as much as possible, now I average 223fps. The difference is massive. I saw you test in starfield and you 5600x was dropping below 60fps in new atlantis, I tested in on my pc, same settings, same location and I constantly had 10-15fps more, when cpu bound. BTW I have a better cooler, PBO is enabled -30 CO and +200mhz.

[@polly_2526]

yeah memory oc is still important in 2023 never listen to mainstrain techtubers said overclock is dead

[@brzimtrco6142]

@polly_2526 it does matter. Maybe it is just in my head, but I can tell you tweaked hynix cjr feels a lot snappier than samsung c-die. Windows just feels more responsive when going from 72ns to 58 in aida benchmark.

[@D3nsity_]

It matters I got an 8700K and rtx 2080 setup that is getting higher number than the 5600x + 4070ti setup shown here lol Faster RAM matters and its not in your head. Anyone who says otherwise really hasn't done their own testing.

[@chrissyboy7047]

I would also agree with this. I replaced my 3200 cl16 ram with 3600 cl14 and it has improved average fps in most games. In games where it hasnt, it has increased minimums still. Thats with a 5800x3d and a 7900 xtx

[@shanno4294]

After setting your setting back out and try shutting down pc for 3min and than turn back on see how the performance is

[@shehtazchowdhury6276]

well that dev straight up lied, I get 60% CPU util with a 5800x

[@connorlake44]

Ryzen 7 7700x cpu B650e-f motherboard 32gb DDR5 RAM RX 6700XT Samsung 980 pro 2TB Nvme I run at 1440p with FSR 2.1 set to performance, all settings at high or ultra, ray tracing set to medium. According to my radeon software I'm averaging 70 fps across 40h of play... outside of dog town. Just got to dog town and it seems like Ray tracing off might be the play.. the environmental detail in the new area is noticeably higher.

[@ivann7214]

I use in i-7 12700f processor, playing cyberpunk and other taxing games. I have not seen my CPU go over 30% usage

[@donaldslayer]

My cpu temps won’t go above 70 on my 5800x3d, also can’t get my gpu hot spot above ~60 in game. Moved my rig into a thermal take ceres 500 recently and it’s slapping!

[@ek2who]

I can confirm that 10900K OC+Fast DDR4 feels fine at UHD60 Overdrive. This CPU is similar to absolutely RT relevant i5 13400 and Ryzen 5800X. CP2077 requirements look a liitle bit confusing like many others.

[@diegotor5643]

Great ! I tought my I9 10900k with my 4070ti will struggle with this game, thanks for the info!! 😅

[@ek2who]

@@diegotor5643 no worries until 15th gen and next AAA RT titles :) SIgnificant upgrade is always better. 10900K OC is capable to load 4090 at 90% in most games with disabled vsync. Enjoy your game =)

[@TheBrummble78]

I'm fully maxed out with a 10900 + 4090 and getting around 85 fps - Makes me wonder if I could have gotten away with a 4080, but what the hell

[@ek2who]

@@TheBrummble78 4080 is way slower with enabled RT, keep in mind.

[@Hoigwai]

My current specs: 5800X3D, 6950XT, 32GB DDR4, Samsung 970 EVO 2TB. All Settings are on high, no RT. The average FPS at 77 hours played is 130FPS @ 1080P.

[@Rat-King27]

Something that I'm noticing is that even my i7-8700k is struggling on full high settings, I have to move some things like crowd density to medium. Because of my motherboard's chipset, if I want to upgrade my PC, I might as well replace everything, which considering my rig is only 5 years old is a bit annoying.

[@nutthaworncharoensuk1483]

I play games on console but I keep watching all of your videos because it's like attending to a fun class that I don't need to😂

[@fubsmcbubs]

There's some weird stuff going on with the Nvidia Reflex I think it's called, in display options. With a 2080Super I was getting 40% gpu usage. I was getting spiking temps into the late 70's and even up to 88, even on low. Messed around with all the options and finally found that just turning the Nvidia Reflex latency thing off suddenly made my GPU use 85%+ and it's now running on ultra at 60fps with average temps around 55, never higher than 60.

[@DeidaArt]

Same here with 3070ti. I disabled it, it runs better without

[@theoryofeverything3647]

You're my saviour man, I'm gonna try it

[@fubsmcbubs]

@@theoryofeverything3647 Any improvement for you?

[@theoryofeverything3647]

@@fubsmcbubs stucked at 44 fps, I normally played for over 80 hours with DLSS Quality enabled and the game gave me stable +70 fps, now its unplayable and I uninstalled it, I've an RTX 3060 paired with an I5 10600kf in 1080p High settings.

[@bamboo9666]

​@@theoryofeverything3647you have cpu bottlenecked. Even my i5-12400f suffer from bottlenecking -_-

[@ermocrate]

I have a 5600X and an RX 7900 XT = 94FPS on a 1440p UW with RT after today's driver update. I use DF optimized settings.

[@eureydice99]

5600X is fine in areas that are not going to heavily utilize the cpu. Highly populated areas like dogtown's black market, cherry blossom market (around Misty and Vik's ripperdoc area) you will start seeing a huge frame drop. Good thing is cpu intensive areas are generally only make up 25 percent ish as most of the quests/gigs are indoors and away from crowded areas. It's just weird that when you're enjoying 100 fps in other areas suddenly it drops in the mid 40s which sucks from gameplay perspective.

[@Varkoroth]

Something changed with the update to 2.0. Prior to it, I was getting stable 120-130fps with drops to upper 90s that weren’t very noticeable. Now I’m getting the same FPS but the drops are way harsher and noticeable, with the occasional drops top upper 70s. Settings are the same, hardware is also the same. 1440p Ultra with RT Ultra and DLSS on quality. R5 5600X with a 4070Ti and 32Gigs of 3200MHz RAM. Game is on an M2 NVMe.

[@romanroman3177]

It's good that they made an update and improved the graphics.The best gaming experience is dlss 3.5

[@smeep7870]

The game will chomp harder at 6 core cpus and do better with 8 core now atleast from what I've seen

[@romanroman3177]

@@smeep7870 I'm actually playing i Ryzen 7 5800x3D RTX 4070 Ti 32G ram setup. The game runs perfectly and I am thoroughly enjoying it.

[@Rufnek2014]

@@romanroman3177 1440p? and are you running RT?

[@romanroman3177]

YES 1440P @@Rufnek2014

[@andrewmutavi590]

"deal with it?,"yikes,someone's spicy,who stole ur lunch?😂😂

[@frankquither4980]

Was playing this last night (NVME, 3070, 5800 x3d, 32 Gb RAM system) playing at 1440p DLSS performance mode, ray reconstruction on (through.ini tweak) ray reflections on only, frame rates just absolutely tanked at the bit you meet Solomon in the dive bar and Daphne/Alex(?) gets upset with him.

[@J0rdan912]

CPU usage spike is insane, I had 100+ fps before Phantom Liberty update on my i5-12400 and now it's barely holding up 60 with constant drops to 40-50 while CPU isn't hitting even 80-85% usage. Had to lower crowd density to low and it's still drops sometimes... WTF CDPR? Edit: Yeah, I was just about to joke "now it's 12700 and 7800X in recommended?" and I saw official system reqs list at the end of video. What a joke...

[@Subject195]

I7 10700 (8 cores 16 threads locked at 4.6ghz) - crowd density medium, rt ultra - stable 50+ fps in Dogtown. 100+ with frame generation. Playing with fps lock and getting smooth experience 😎

[@Efsaaneh]

My 1050 ti 4gb is still kicking ass in medium settings with performance fsr, gives 50-60 most of the time and doesn't drop below 30 in the most intense places

[@darkmugetsu6572]

I can't even run Cyberpunk without crashing every 5 minutes on my 3060 . I disabled all Raytracing, clean install 3 times and deleted all mod files. Updated graphic Drivers, downgraded graphic drivers. Downgraded the graphics more and more and still getting GPU failed for Unkown reason crashes.

[@jamsquan9415]

did u ever find out what was wrong with ur gpu? or it just didn't like that one game?

[@mastercc4509]

Max raster performance without RT lighting but with RT reflections on looks better to me than RT lights to lowest setting.

[@sousefooldnb6136]

Quick Tip that worked for me : Disabling Base reflections (wich look like crap on ultra and lower, i just recommand to use it with psycho but with huge performances hit IMO) and setting crowd to medium is the only way to get back my smooth cyberpunk experience with my 5600X and 6750 XT, also i use Ray traced Shadows and it still working fine at 60+ FPS for 95% of the time AND without FSR for max graphical fidelity ! And of course SMT ON. Only in very dense area with lot of NPC it drop to 40-50 but like the base game obviously.

[@EtsuKanno]

Cascade Shadows Range low or med helps a little too with CPU bound on 6700xt + 5600 non x

[@mikkaloo6525]

2k?

[@sousefooldnb6136]

@@mikkaloo6525 1080p

[@rickflare6893]

Can’t believe your at 150k subs dan. How does your family react to the new found popularity?

[@suprmeatdude]

Have only seen a few drops below 60 in Dogtown with my Ryzen 5600 / RX 6600 on 1080 High no FSR. Can run Ultra with FSR 2.0 Quality but I hate how the game looks.

[@Orodreth888]

I have a Ryzen 7 3700X and CP77 with frame generation is not even remotely as taxing as BG3 xD barely scratch 60°C on the CPU.

[@jarrodhroberson]

Programmers will tell you "context switching is a bitch" more threads has dismissing returns and at a point is a net loss

[@jebus456]

Big Daniel! Woweeoo

[@leonmenssen999]

since i buyed phantom yesterday i got textures loading very slow some npc need like 20-30 sec to load

[@Art0r1a]

So is this one of those cases, where a game uses much more CPU, but delivers the same performance? Gonna wait a few days for early patches, and will try it on the weekend to see what I get.

[@eikbolha5883]

Ánd yett after 9 months we still dont have this patched 😂😂😂😅😅😢😢

[@silverfoxvr8541]

Path Tracing reduced my CPU usage by 30%. 5800x and 4080. My 5800x is being brutalized by this game and Starfield. Well, VR and Sim racing too.

[@milosstojanovic4623]

and thats some bullshit. 5700x and 5800x should run this game (any game) easily on FHD. and they are asking for R7 7th gen paired with 2060 super... i mean what stupid logic is that!? Ridiculous.

[@HopemanGG]

The only reason you need a better CPU for preset ultra is because crowd density is being bumped up from medium to high. I don't know what they did but looking at something like Assassin's Creed games, I can't fathom what they did with NPCs that makes your system lose 20fps when going from medium to high. At this point I assume it is incompetence or a problem with the engine. At the least we now know that CDPR's marketing is as disconnected as ever from the dev side. Otherwise they would have at least given us a hint that their whole CPU requirements hinge on that one single setting.

[@FirebladeXXL]

for me it was neither cpu nor gpu that was ever above 70%. still in dogtown my fps tanked at times in the area in front of the stadium and inside the stadium specifically.

[@thepopmanbrad]

tbh with a gtx 1650 and a ryzen 5 3500 and 40 gbs of ram i get 50-60 fps with fsr and the game looks and runs great both 2.0 and PL completed PL

[@Matt-iq7ci]

For me the game just became extremely fluid(ryzen 7600x). On patch 1.63 I had ocassional stutters while driving and moving camera around and now... It feels like butter. General performance is maybe down 5% but it became super steady and fluid.

[@android33.]

*Daniel casually running over NPC's* "Sorry guys, it's for KZbin"

[@out42c]

CyberPunk 2077 2.0 runs great on my Ryzen 1700X and RX 6800 combo high with RT minimum and ultra no RT 1440P. Haven't tried it on the 5800X yet but clearly do not need to. Probably won't buy Phantom Liberty.

[@ZenTunE-]

The game is just downloading but I can already hear my 10500 crying. Before I could at least get 60fps worst case scenario running the game at 3440x1440 but we'll see about that now xD

[@mitchelldittes2555]

Why are they equating a 7800x3d to a 12700k? The difference is SOOO huge. The 7800x3d is gonna run it better than a 7900x but put below it on rec requirements? Do they know what these components are?

[@briandennison2146]

Great videio, Inoticed my 5800x3d gets bottlenecked yesterday glad it wasn't just my system

[@Ladioz]

my 5800X3D keeps going to 90-100% usage

[@meteuor2859]

same here, it's kind of disappointing, like to be honest new area looks worse than night city and is less crowded yet it dips peformance more@@Ladioz

[@ItsVab]

Heh, that makes a lotta sense. I have a 12900K/3080 Ti and the game is struggling, with my CPU reaching 92-95 degrees C sometimes. My cooling with the CPU has some issues so it’s likely not running as nicely as it could because of that. Will probably have to figure that out before anything else

[@Monster-Abee]

I'm enjoying the performance of my lowly 5700x and my 4090 at 4K on an oled. I limit the fps to 116 anyway, so there is no need to stress. Cyberpunk is fantastic.

[@TheBrummble78]

I'm fully maxed out with a 10900 + 4090 and getting around 85 fps - Makes me wonder if I could have gotten away with a 4080, but what the hell

[@dianaalyssa8726]

Haven't played yet but it's interesting to theorycraft where I would end up playing with a 12700KF 7900XTX. The requirements have jumped this xpac certainly.

[@user-lm3fm4cq5i]

I experienced that 1.6 was running a lot better with RT on my 5600x + 3070. I get ~60-70 fps on RT Ultra with some minor tweaks to general settings but it feels unplayable cause of sudden 1ms dips. Even if i stand still and just move the mouse left to right and back when having over 60 fps it's just not smooth. And that is with crowd density already on medium as well. (RT lightning medium or ultra really made no difference ) Non RT performance hovers around 80-100 fps, so it's perfectly playable, but i was really looking forward to RT - gaming. In 1.6 the frames were more in the 80s even with RT Ultra. Kinda sad that my CPU is already on the weak side again seeing that i somewhat recently upgraded to it from a 2600. At least my other games are still running perfectly fine haha. Just gotta accept that RT , RT Overdrive and Cyberpunk in general is best enjoyed with High-End hardware if you want the visual delicacy.

[@starstreamgamer3704]

Same here. Went from 2600 to 5600. It was a decent upgrade. 5600 is ~50% faster across a wide range of games. The major aspect of Ryzens - they desperately need high RAM and Infinity Fabric bandwidth. If you overclock and tune RAM, you get pretty significant performance bump. Going from stock 3600MHz/CL18 to tuned 3800MHz/CL16 brings about 15% performance improvement. That way my 5600 is still relevant, even when paired with 4070 Ti. I mostly get 60+ fps in RT mode with rare dips to upper 50s. Reducing "Crowd Density" to "Medium" make it stable 60+ fps all the time. Tuned RAM will let me wait for some time until severely overpriced 5800X3D gets a significant discount, to justify it's ~15-20% bump in performance over tuned 5600.

[@ryanspencer6778]

It's crazy how demanding dogtown is on the CPU. I can get 45-55 fps with a 3900x, which becomes 75-80fps with frame generation and path tracing on. That becomes over 100fps anywhere else on the map, with a CPU performance of at least 60fps (I'm GPU limited at DLSS performance). I'm wondering how that will work on consoles. The PS5 has what is essentially a 3700x, which can't hit 60fps in Dogtown, but can easily hit well over that in the rest of the map. Makes balancing the game areas difficult on the consoles. I don't blame CDPR for this, as the game as a whole uses 40-60% of my CPU, which is more than I've seen from any other game, so it's well optimized on that front. However, Dogtown doesn't look fundamentally different from the rest of night city, so I'm not sure why this is the case. Maybe the sheer number of NPCs and objects, but it really could be optimized better. It's just an expansion area, it shouldn't be this much harder to run.

[@eureydice99]

I think they've tweaked the crowd density and some other cpu intensive settings like cascaded shadow resolution to be much less taxing on performance mode of PS5 and XBox series X/S.

[@BrandensOutdoorChannel]

Glad to still have a 9900k. I just upgraded from rtx 2070 to rtx 4070 ti super and get 80 fps with 1440p RT overdrive.

[@ilya_kor]

I don't know why, but even with SMT enabled Cyberpunk still only uses one thread (nearly 90%) on my 5600x when I'm clearly CPU limited. My other cores utilization is only 0%-5% ;(

[@Iowcatalyst]

updated my 5600x to a 5800x3d a couple of days ago, just before this game came out, definitely improved performance a lot in cyberpunk, the one area that would really choke the cpu and stutter badly is now perfectly smooth. Only played the beginning of phantom liberty , haven't got to drive yet but performance seems decent so far, getting 60 plus at 1440p with ray traced reflections on a 6900xt, it briefly dropped to high 50's in the first built up section but was smooth so was the gpu rather than the cpu struggling

[@dragonsyph2557]

50 fps is not smooth