Cyberpunk 2077, perhaps the most anticipated game of 2020, is a very demanding title and users of “older” CPUs may experience subpar performance. Fortunately, thanks to some Reddit detectives there are a few things that you can do to increase your performance in this game.
Before we get started, please be aware that these fixes are not necessarily a “magic bullet.” While these will provide performance benefits for many systems, be sure to back up any files you change before changing them in case you run into problems after applying these tweaks.
Memory Pool Tweaks – for both Intel & Ryzen systems
Update 12/24: CDPR has removed the memory pool configuration file, stating that it was leftover from development and did not affect the performance of the PC release – and that any observed performance improvements were from restarting the game.
Thanks to /u/ThePhoenixRoyal, it has been discovered that some of the settings for PC users are the same as the consoles. Specifically, the memory pool settings for CPUs & GPUs.
To change this, you’ll need to open \engine\config\memory_pool_budgets.csv in the Cyberpunk 2077 installation folder. For optimal performance, it is recommended to set both of these values to 0. As the configuration file states, this will cause the budgets for both to be “computed dynamically at runtime”. An associate of mine applied this fix to his i7-4790k and RTX 3080 setup, and reported a boost of ~25fps. In my own testing, I had a 14% performance increase at CPU bottlenecked settings.
SMT Utilization fix for AMD Ryzen systems
Update 12/24: CDPR has updated Cyberpunk 2077 after consulting with AMD, as a result users of 6-core systems no longer need to apply this fix. However, behavior remains unchanged for users of 8+ core Ryzen CPUs.
Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the few games in which Intel CPUs perform better than Ryzen 5000 systems. Many reviewers and users, such as GameGPU, have noticed that SMT threads are not being utilized by Cyberpunk 2077 on AMD systems.
Initially some users speculated that this could be a result of issues from the usage of Intel’s C++ Compiler, however this is not the culprit. The problem arises from code in AMD’s GPUOpen project, which limits the number of threads spawned by programs to the numbers of cores on post-Bulldozer CPUs as a result of issues some programs faced with utilizing SMT with on Ryzen CPUs.
If you feel comfortable with HEX Editing the Cyperbunk EXE file, there is a potential fix provided by /u/UnhingedDork. With a HEX Editor such as HxD, open the Cyberpunk EXE file and search for “75 30 33 C9 B8 01 00 00 00 0F A2 8B C8 C1 F9 08″. Change that to “EB 30 33 C9 B8 01 00 00 00 0F A2 8B C8 C1 F9 08″. Please make sure to back up the EXE file before editing it, as your results may vary! This fix seems to work best with 6-8 core Ryzen CPUs. CapFrameX tested his 5900X with this fix and it resulted in worse performance. However, when ran the same CPU with only 6 cores enabled, he reported a performance increase of 18 FPS!
GPU related optimizations
Other than the fixes above, be sure to check out Digital Foundry’s article on optimizing your GPU settings for the best performance – these can also increase your framerates by up to 35%.
