izigame.me

A personal disclaimer because I am tired of people saying this:
THE GAME IS OPTIMIZED ON THE GPU AT LEAST. A FEW FEATURES THAT ARE IMPORTANT TO ME ARE JUST A BIT BROKEN RIGHT NOW. Also I have settings that work well for me towards the end of the review for anyone who needs it.
I was extremely excited for this game, and while the game play is good; unfortunately, the technical state of this port is poor. DLSS is broken and causes significant dithering on hair and shadows (only ray traced.) There is also a significant cost (7%) associated with ray reconstruction on my 4070 (both with CNN and transformer) which just doesn't seem right. Frame gen is almost a must to avoid CPU related issues. This is all barring the constant crashes. The game has crashed 5 times for me now, it's been an hour. I have a relatively high end PC: R5 7600, 32GB RAM (6000MT/s), RTX 4070 and an NVME drive with 6600MB/s sequential read speeds (along with my CPU this far exceeds the capabilities of the PS5.) I run Cyberpunk 2077 with path tracing at 1440p, DLSS Balanced with frame gen at an 80 fps average with 70fps 1% lows. This game has no reason to be struggling as much as it is, really.
WAIT FOR A PATCH BEFORE BUYING!
Addressing a few things I have read in the comments (kept them open for a reason hehe):
1. This is RELATIVELY high end. An objectively high end system would be 4070ti Super+ on Nvidia and 7900XTX+ on AMD. But, we live in a world where most people have a 3060, 4060, 1650, etc and the PS5 is a 2070 super equivalent with ray tracing enabled.
2. To the people telling me to turn down my settings - I did! After I got back from work - working on an ASIC (im in computer engineering lmao, know some people in the comments will find this hard to believe.) HELPFUL INFORMATION FOR NVIDIA USERS: Ray reconstruction is currently, definitely broken. It is what is causing the excessive dithering. The 7% performance loss when turning RR on did not come from RR; but, rather, you cannot use RR with High RTAO and High Reflections. These settings will automatically be locked to Very High once you turn RR on. That is why I did not see any real performance difference between Legacy and Transformer models. I have been playing with it off, and it has been running smooth.
3. DLSS Frame Generation is definitely the culprit for my crashes. From what I can see on the overlay on MSI afterburner when such a crash occurs, it doesn't seem like a VRAM buffer issue. I wonder if memory is being allocated in RAM in the past (when and if the buffer is exceeded) that cannot be reached in the future? The thing is, I have seen cards with far larger VRAM buffers crashing with frame generation, so I'm not sure what it is.
4. I have already reported these issues on my end, and will make official bug posts when I have the time. My intention here is to help consumers who want to keep enjoying this otherwise excellent game, or to tell other consumers who are maybe expecting a better experience to wait just a bit longer.
Some positives just to even this out:
- This game is absolutely stunning. With and without ray tracing. Barring the significant issues with newer technologies such as RR, the rasterization performance and quality is superb.
- The game IS CPU heavy, and I have never denied that. It is CPU heavy because there is a significant amount of NPCs, cars, etc being loaded and unloaded from the GPU. Adding ray tracing on top, where the BVH structure is being re calculated constantly, is a massive burden as well. However, I have never seen my CPU usage exceed 60%. Some cores lay idle, while others are doing all the work. I have seen this on a R7 7700 as well. I don't expect this on a 12 thread system, when the PS5, FOR EXAMPLE, has 16 threads. You can always turn down the crowd density and level of detail settings down and this well help a lot. Why is this a positive? Because it makes the world feel SO LIVELY!
- The settings menu is the best I have ever seen, nothing less. The explanations of what each setting does is accurate and to the point. I am sure a layperson could understand it with little to no issues. The fact that you can see the result of changing a setting in real time is great.
- The game is extremely accessible.
Finally, here are the settings I am currently using to get a locked 60 at 1440p on my rig (1% lows around 58.):
- DLSS: Quality
- DLSS FG: Off
- Texture Quality - Very High (I haven't tested it extensively, but if you really want to use frame gen consider turning this down to save on VRAM, this MIGHT work.)
- Texture Filtering - 16x (wouldn't bother turning this down unless you're on an iGPU.
- Shadow Quality - Very High (you can turn this down to high)
- LOD - Very High
- Traffic Density - High (Idc about car density in new york that much.)
- Crowd Density - Very High (Important to me to make new york believable.)
- Hair Quality - High
- SSR - High
- Weather Particle Quality - Very High (effects untested)
- RT Reflections - High
- RT Interiors - High
- RT Shadows - Medium
- RTAO - High
- RT Object range - 7 (below 7 doesn't give me much CPU overhead and I get a few more objects in the BVH with 7.)
- DLSS RR - Off
This will be the last time I update this review until, at least, frame generation is fixed - after which I will ammend the review, and recommend the game. Thank you all for reading!