CD Projekt RED promised a major patch for Cyberpunk 2077 in January and the studio duly delivered, with version 1.10 promising a slew of bug fixes, stability improvements and – for PlayStation 4 at least – the promise of actual performance upgrades. And this is crucial because we have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that crashes can be rectified and glitches removed, but the fundamental issue is this: does last-gen hardware have the horsepower to deliver a consistent level of performance that’s much closer to the target 30fps? Performance analysis of version 1.10 gives us optimism in some respects, but there’s still a mountain to climb.
Of course, version 1.10 has since been updated with patch 1.11, which essentially delivers a hotfix update to correct a couple of bugs, but the main optimisation and stability push introduced memory management improvements, and addressed a large array of bugs. What’s curious are the platform-specific optimisations: there’s talk of crowd optimisation for PS4 Pro and PlayStation 5, but surely the base PS4 should improve too? And why wouldn’t these optimisations also improve the situation for Xbox One users. For its part, the Microsoft platform saw memory management changes, specifically around character creation, mirrors, camera scanning and much more.
Curiously though, our tests suggest that there are further improvements – and since it’s the vanilla PS4 and Xbox One that really need a lot of work, those are the platforms we initially chose to take a look at. Something we can report straight away: we didn’t see the game crash, or lock, or drop back to the front end at all. That’s not to say we didn’t encounter glitches and bugs – we definitely did – but cleaning up crashing problems and delivering a more stable experience is likely the number one objective of CD Projekt RED. Obviously, our testing is limited to a small area of the game, but we’d chalk this up as a significant step forward for the game.
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