Tuesday, September 12th 2023
Cyberpunk 2077 Dev Confirms Support for 8-core CPUs with Update 2.0 & Phantom Liberty
Filip Pierściński, the lead scene programmer at CD Projekt Red, has been posting some compelling information regarding technical improvements lined up for the PC version of Cyberpunk 2077. Update 2.0 and the major Phantom Liberty DLC campaign are due to launch on September 26, although a PlayStation database leak suggests that the former could arrive this week—a whole bunch of new features, characters, missions and stories are promised, although the pay-for-pack nets you the majority of upcoming intriguing goodies. We hope that there is no premium placed on performance upgrades for the PC platform—Pierściński's declarations imply that enhancements are arriving with Update 2.0 and Phantom Liberty (PL). The next version of CD Projekt Red's ambitious action role-player will take full advantage of multi-core CPUs, although there are some thermal-related caveats according to the programmer's social media postings: "Before release CP2077 v2.0 and PL please check conditions of your cooling systems in PC. We use all (that) you have, so workload on CPU 90% on 8 core is expected. To save your time please run Cinebench or similar and check (the) stability of your systems."
He was happy to field questions from the fan base—a worried gamer expressed some concern about the game's potential hardware cooking prowess. Pierściński replied: "Heheh of course not 😀 we are not synthetic benchmark, but still you can hit thermal throttling, if you have insufficient cooling system. It will result in below expected performance or even crash in extreme situations." The Cyberpunk 2077 modification community pre-empted CD Projekt Red by several months with the release of an unofficial SMT fix to address and fix lower utilization of AMD and Intel CPU architectures. Pierściński also confirms that third-party produced patches are no longer needed, thanks to native support being introduced with CDPR's official September updates, although players are best advised to stick with 8-core SMT configurations.
Sources:
Wccftech #1, Wccftech #2, VideoCardz
He was happy to field questions from the fan base—a worried gamer expressed some concern about the game's potential hardware cooking prowess. Pierściński replied: "Heheh of course not 😀 we are not synthetic benchmark, but still you can hit thermal throttling, if you have insufficient cooling system. It will result in below expected performance or even crash in extreme situations." The Cyberpunk 2077 modification community pre-empted CD Projekt Red by several months with the release of an unofficial SMT fix to address and fix lower utilization of AMD and Intel CPU architectures. Pierściński also confirms that third-party produced patches are no longer needed, thanks to native support being introduced with CDPR's official September updates, although players are best advised to stick with 8-core SMT configurations.
19 Comments on Cyberpunk 2077 Dev Confirms Support for 8-core CPUs with Update 2.0 & Phantom Liberty
Will the game be a refreshment or another stale reminder of what it is I wonder.
Just kidding, this game feels very unfinished (by me) despite over 700 hours played and I'm still capable of occasional "whoa, didn't know about this feature/event/whatever."
Don't trust my review much tho, I am a shitposter by nature and I freaking love bugfests with weird plot, bizarre NPCs, dumb enemies and even more unicornish than just non-existent physics. That's why I enjoyed FallOut 3 so much; same goes to FallOut 4. Neverending laughter.
Will be great to get the game with the next good sale tho :)
Why don't they code their engine to work throughout many asynchronous threads and then the system itself distributes these among the resources that are present? There's definitely more than 16 threads running on a game like Cyberpunk, not to mention all the drivers and other O.S. overhead in windows.
And if it's not it's just to be understood as "our game is capable of knocking 8-core CPUs down," and not as "we specifically optimised the game for 8-core processors." At least I think so.
He's saying 24 threads is too many threads, to the point of being preferable to disable SMT and run only 12 threads so that the CPU cores can boost a couple hundred MHz more.
That's what's making me thing they're only now optimizing the engine to run on the consoles' 8c/16t configuration, but the fact that it seems to be hand-tuned to that seems a bit backwards.
At least from the strategic PoV of an arm-chair non-specialist like myself.
Outside of the enthusiasts and dabblers in building, o.c etc, who in the regular community (so not this forum's crowd) even knows what cinebench is ?
Cyberpunk is actually one of the most scalable games, so I hope there's a reason for it.