CD Projekt Red's open-world RPG Cyberpunk 2077 launched with plenty of issues. It showed underwhelming performance across all platforms and game-breaking bugs. With the release of the day-one patch, the game became quite playable except for the base PS4 and Xbox One consoles. This has naturally led the fans to bombard the developers with negative reviews for lying to them and delivering an incomplete game.
The issue with the base PS4 and Xbox One consoles
Amidst all this, several hardware analysts are trying to figure out the cause behind the game's underwhelming performance on PS4 and Xbox One. And according to the Digital Foundry report, it seems that the consoles were held back by the Jaguar CPU. In a series of tests, experts observed that the game runs at 720P on the base PS4. Sometimes, it would go up to 900P but with glitches and blurry details. Digital Foundry also compared the PS4 version of the game to the Witcher 3's port on the Nintendo Switch.
Digital Foundry added that the game maxed out at 1188P on the PS4 Pro and dipped as low as 972P in their playthrough. But they noticed that the frame rates would also occasionally drop to as low as 20 FPS.
CPU alone is not the culprit
Initially, the experts were wondering if the performance hit was due to low RAM. However, upon testing the game on the Xbox Series S, which also features less usable memory, it was discovered that the console delivers consistent performance in the game. This ruled out low RAM availability from the equation. So, the team believed that it could be the underpowered CPU of PS4, causing poor performance. To boot, both PS4 and Xbox One have slower mechanical drives. That could be a reason as well for graphical glitches like slow texture loading.
Cyberpunk 2077 is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Stadia.
