'Cyberpunk 2077' Players Are Fixing Parts of the Game Before CD Projekt (vice.com) 79
Cyberpunk 2077 is here in all its glory and pain. On some machines, it's a visual spectacle pushing the limits of current technology and delivering on the promise of Deus Ex, but open world. On other machines, including last-gen consoles, it's a unoptimized and barely playable nightmare. Developer CD Projekt Red has said it's working to improve the game, but fans already have a number of fixes, particularly if you're using an AMD CPU. From a report: Fans aren't waiting for the developer however and over the weekend AMD CPU users discovered that a few small tweaks could improve performance on their PCs. Some players reported performance gains of as much as 60 percent. Cyberpunk 2077 seems to be a CPU intensive game and, at release, it isn't properly optimized for AMD chips. "If you run the game on an AMD CPU and check your usage in task manager, it seems to utilise 4 (logical, 2 physical) cores in frequent bursts up to 100% usage, whereas the rest of the physical cores sit around 40-60%, and their logical counterparts remain idle," Redditor BramblexD explained in a post on the /r/AMD subreddit. Basically, Cyberpunk 2077 is only utilizing a portion of any AMD chips power.
Digital Foundry, a YouTube channel that does in-depth technical analysis of video games, noticed the AMD issue as well. "It really looks like Cyberpunk is not properly using the hyperthreads on Ryzen CPUs," Digital Foundry said in a recent video. To fix this issue, the community has developed three separate solutions. One involves altering the game's executable with a hex editor, the other involves editing a config file, and a third is an unofficial patch built by the community. All three do the same thing -- unleash the power of AMDs processors. "Holy shit are you a wizard or something? The game is finally playable now!" One redditor said of the hex editing technique. "With this tweak my CPU usage went from 50% to ~75% and my frametime is so much more stable now."
Digital Foundry, a YouTube channel that does in-depth technical analysis of video games, noticed the AMD issue as well. "It really looks like Cyberpunk is not properly using the hyperthreads on Ryzen CPUs," Digital Foundry said in a recent video. To fix this issue, the community has developed three separate solutions. One involves altering the game's executable with a hex editor, the other involves editing a config file, and a third is an unofficial patch built by the community. All three do the same thing -- unleash the power of AMDs processors. "Holy shit are you a wizard or something? The game is finally playable now!" One redditor said of the hex editing technique. "With this tweak my CPU usage went from 50% to ~75% and my frametime is so much more stable now."
NO DRM = Easy to mod Just buy on GOG.com only (Score:5, Insightful)
NO DRM = Easy to mod Just buy on GOG.com only
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No need to buy on GOG. The game was released DRM free, period. You're more than happy to modify the steam variants too.
Fixing a cyberpunk game by hex editing (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: Fixing a cyberpunk game by hex editing (Score:2)
Uum, it's how we all did it since the dawn of gaming.
*fondly remembers IDA Pro running in the background, live-"debugging" certain long codes you had to enter. s/JNE/NOP/ :D
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Modding has been a thing forever. Why this is news is probably because there are fewer players who aren't on consoles. I remember when Fallout 4 allowed mods in xbox and playstation, and the console players were baffled about how they would prevent "cheating" in single player games. So many games on Nexus now.
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Re:Fixing a cyberpunk game by hex editing (Score:5, Funny)
If I were CDPR... (Score:2)
I'd throw money/freebies to those communities.
Sounds like collective intelligence working great.
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*Looks at every NetEase engine game ever* In what universe is this a new thing?
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Sorry, NetImmerse, not NetEase.
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The rewards, haven't heard of any such case.
The fixing is definitely not a new thing.
I'm just saying it here because they've been having some community drama recently with the crunch, and that's a nice way to buy (literally) some goodwill
Summary doesn't say what the hex edit does (Score:5, Informative)
But from further reading it's a patch to skip a cpu check.
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They implemented a third party library that wants optimization before shipping. They didn't bother to do that; thus, unoptimized defaults that just happen to affect Ryzen CPUs. Put down the pitchfork.
Re:Summary doesn't say what the hex edit does (Score:5, Insightful)
The 3rd party library (GPUOpen) that made the game work slower on AMD chips was authored by... AMD: https://gpuopen.com/ [gpuopen.com]
Definitely no need for pitchforks.
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If they pitchforked AMD for borking itself... that'd be some amusement....
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Anyone found a fix for "style over substance"? (Score:2)
I suspect that may be a little tricky.
Skipping this game, as all reviews I've read - even glowing ones (between the lines) - indicate the 'open world' is pretty much a pretty facade with zero depth.
This is no GTA V or RDR2, in other words.
For many SP gamers of titles like this, there's a level of expectation that open world means a ton of fun to be had messing around.
Heck, I've spent hours (to no avail), trying to blow trains up in RDR2 outside of a 'set' story line - probably impossible, but so much weird
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True open world, where you can do anything you want to, is impossible to code right now, even open world, within the confines of the game (as you have seen, trying to go beyond what the engine is scripted for) is virtually impossible.
Perhaps within generation of RNN/ML that allows it to modify the code-base on the fly, a game will come along where you can do this, but for now, open world games are a mile wide and an inch deep
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Some of them have lots of pretty things to see... but have less actual useful contact than a MUD.
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but for now, open world games are a mile wide and an inch deep
Perhaps you should once at least try one?
* eve online
* elite dangerous
* entropia
* wurm online
* second life
In no particular order ...
Re:Anyone found a fix for "style over substance"? (Score:4, Interesting)
Oblivion had more realistic NPCs. This thing isn't an open world at all, everything is on very simple rails. Many action scenes are actually cut scenes with no real player control: your weapons do zero damage because the NPCs are scripted to run into a lamp post later. And the NPCs can take you down to 1 HP but you don't die. You can literally go get a cup of coffee and come back later.
It's absolutely bonkers how bad this game is. Worse hype to delivery ratio than No Man's Sky at launch.
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Every game it tried to leverage, the other game did it better. GTA, Skyrim, and RDR2 all run circles around this as far as implementation. 95% of the NPCs just say 'hey' or 'don't bother me'. The city for all it's raving about how huge and complete it was is still littered with locked doors as filler.
That said, it wasn't I looked at the time on sat night that I realized it was 2am. Warzone wears me out after a few hours, this I could have played all night.
If it weren't so fluid with a lack of loading times
Re:Anyone found a fix for "style over substance"? (Score:4, Funny)
And in New York 95% of the people you tried to talk to would do much the same. Your point?
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He wants them to ask him if he gets to the Cloud District very often. Oh what am I saying? Of course he doesn't.
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Worse hype to delivery ratio than No Man's Sky at launch.
I mean it's not a perfect game but there's no need for completely baseless hyperbole. Either that your you and I remember No Man Sky very differently.
In any case the game currently has a 7.0 on Metacritic from user reviews showing that the majority of users are happy with the content they received. And the game core mechanics and content isn't even the subject of most of the negative reviews. Which cannot be said for No Man Sky which just fucking terrible when compared to what was promised.
I'm not sure wher
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You don't know what you're talking about. A score of 7 on Metacritic is a C-. It certainly does not mean the majority of users are happy with it.
Sure, the score alone doesn't mean the majority of people are happy with it. You could have the majority of votes be 5/10 and enough votes above 7.0 to bring the average up. But, realistically... a score of 7.0 means the majority of people are happy with it. To go one step further, looking at the review counts on metacritic almost 66% of the user reviews were positive. So yes, the majority of people are happy with it.
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Who doesn't want a game where you can spend time tweaking how the genitals of your character looks.
Re: Anyone found a fix for "style over substance"? (Score:1)
Well, can we please stop having every game be the same open world 3D sandbox with collectibles and crafting now?
I've seen Doom, System Shock, GTA and the likes. Everything feels like a mere clone. I'm not gonna shell over money unless there's some actual innovation. :)
(OK, and unless developers are treated properly and the game is paid in advance and released for free... So never any AAA.
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Open world games are the new craze, just like everything had to be an MMO 15 years ago, and first-person shooter 10 years before that. There will be good implementations, and there will be absolute shit. So it goes.
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Throw in a sprinkling of confirmation bias and a dash of selection bias and you'll quickly end up with "Videogames now are so much worse than they used to be!"
Re:Anyone found a fix for "style over substance"? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure what substance you think GTA has in its world that this one lacks. All open world games have a great breadth of content but lack depth. Its the nature of the beast. This game is in many ways GTA meets Bladerunner with RPG mechanics thrown in.
As for performance, I'm not sure what people were expecting. On proper hardware it performs perfectly fine. And on anything else its performs exactly as you would expect. AAA ambitious games rarely perform well on low end PCs and last gen consoles. And it worth noting that those consoles never were impressive. The Jaguar cores were anemic and the GPUs weren't industry leading at launch.
Skyrim ran like shit on anything that wasn't a a decent gaming PC at launch too. Same with RDR2, same with GTAV. Same with most of these games. The Witcher also kicked machine's asses. That's how this works. Not sure why the standards are different now.
As for bugs, yeah its got em but I haven't had anything game breaking yet and its certainly not Bethesda bad. And the game isn't as half baked as Mass Effect Andromeda was. I can actually think of a lot of games in the last 10 years that had rougher launches than this but ended up being fine.
That doesn't excuse the issues but I think they should be put in perspective. Cyberpunk's issues are not unique nor are they out of the ordinary for the industry. I do think that 's sad though. It used to be you couldn't patch software online so you had to ship it right the first time. You also couldn't nickel and dime people with content after the fact either. But I digress.
My Specs: Ryzen 3700X, Radeon 5700XT, 32GiB DDR4-3200, Samsung 970 Pro. I can run it perfectly fine at 1440p Ultra. Only FPS issues I've had have coincided with glitches. My rig isn't a potato but its also not anywhere near top of the line.
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As for performance, I'm not sure what people were expecting. On proper hardware it performs perfectly fine.
Actually it doesn't which is kind of the point of the entire story. The game is poorly optimised. Sure idiots complaining they can't run 4K with RTX on on their Ti84 calculator are morons, but the reality is there are optimisation tweaks that make the game run significantly better on the same hardware with identical visuals, which is very much something that is worth complaining about.
Cyberpunk isn't unique but that's more because we've come to expect half baked garbage from game studios in the past 5 or so
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Actually it doesn't which is kind of the point of the entire story.
I disagree. The point of the article is that its poorly optimized. It can run well and be poorly optimized at the same time. Like I said, I am getting perfectly acceptable performance with the hardware listed which is neither potato nor top of the line. But I think is pretty representative of a mid range gaming PC in 2020.
Cyberpunk isn't unique but that's more because we've come to expect half baked garbage from game studios in the past 5 or so years. Shit just look at the Medal of Honour release recently.
Indeed.
Maybe I'm just jaded because I remember a time where studios pulled incredible feats and did all manner of amazing hacks to pull out visual quality that blew our minds on hardware even the hardware engineers thought wasn't possible.
I agree. Code is sloppy and not nearly as efficient anymore. I think back to a particularly arrogant ass on here who once told me their time was more important than my ram. But I do
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It can run well and be poorly optimized at the same time.
By the very nature of it being poorly optimised it runs poorly on hardware which should run the game fine. You threw money at the problem. Congratulations on being fortunate enough to have a mid spec'd gaming PC for 2020. Not everyone is as fortunate as you.
You absolutely don't need a 3090 to run the game well.
Well means you get it to run acceptably at the highest possible settings. The facts are unless you drop graphics settings off their top allowable setting the game doesn't run well unless you have the top tier card.
The kid who has been paying rocket league at 1080p has no legitimate reason to expect cyberpunk will run at any settings higher than low.
But thanks for coming back to my origina
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By the very nature of it being poorly optimised it runs poorly on hardware which should run the game fine.
Not necessarily. Its just inefficient. Inefficient can still be fast although it often is not.
Congratulations on being fortunate enough to have a mid spec'd gaming PC for 2020. Not everyone is as fortunate as you.
Oh please. Don't throw privilege bs into this. Hobbies cost money and you get what you pay for. If you are unable or unwilling to properly buy in to a hobby then I'm sorry, gaming isn't a charity. And its nobody's job to support old or low end hardware. If you are a kid I get it, we've all been there where you want a cool rig but you parents wont bankroll you. But as an adult, your budget is your personal responsib
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Idiots often seem rather proud to confidently share their ignorance with others.
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Don't jump to conclusions. I've seen our resident troll SuperKendall ask this question and make this post multiple times and each time his "esteemed Slashdot poster" has told him nothing of the sort.
Re:Games use CPU? (Score:4, Insightful)
It depends on the title. Some are very CPU dependent and barely touch a GPU at all. Some do the opposite, some do both, some do neither. This is very much a case by case basis.
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Your "esteemed Slashdot posters" were incorrect, and you shouldn't listen to them. Also, that's never been the case, so if you listened to such rubbish "advice" to begin with, you should probably re-examine your own criteria for deciding who to get expert advice from.
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I was told by esteemed Slashdot posters that CPU performance was irrelevant to game performance these days, a powerful GPU was all that mattered...
You didn't pay attention, not the first time you posted this, not the last 5 times you posted this exact comment and were corrected. Esteemed Slashdot posters told you something far more refined but your attention span was too short.
And yet if you followed those directives right out of the gate Cyberpunk 2077 shuts you down.
It does nothing of the sort. The game runs on an 8 year old i5 if you want it to. Mind you unless you're completely stupid and pretend that I/O bottlenecks aren't a thing you won't be running an 8 year old CPU with even a remotely modern graphics card. You'll likely have a 7 yea
Apple Silicon does have hardware for AAA gameing (Score:2)
Apple Silicon does have hardware for AAA gameing at high res 16GB ram max CPU + GPU.
and what gamer will want to play an $1500-$2000+ mac that is blownen away by an $1500 PC?
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and what gamer will want to play an $1500-$2000+ mac that is blownen away by an $1500 PC?
Answer: a gamer that already has the Mac and doesn't want to spend $1500 for an incremental improvement if they don't have to.
Never understood the point of that question, other than perpetuating dopey platform superiority arguments, or trying to be cooler than the room.
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>a gamer that already has the Mac and doesn't want to spend $1500 for an incremental improvement if they don't have to.
It's that legendary creature. Legendary in that people talk about it, but no one has ever encountered it.
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I have a few macs and no PC ... you want me to buy a new PC? Probably even running windows 10? And a monitor? Sorry ... no way.
If a game company ignores a huge deal of the market it does not deserve my money.
It's due to sample code from an AMD library (Score:3)
It's because they used core count detection in the sample code of GPUOpen [gpuopen.com], which
Our sample code, linked below, errs on the side of caution for our Ryzen processors and encourages you to profile: the getDefaultThreadCount() function draws attention to that fact, returning a starting default count equal to the number of physical processor cores on Ryzen.
But yes, ideally they would have profiled as recommended by the sample code, and adjusted it to use the logical core count in their case(or possibly distinguish between Zen1/2/3).
Re: It's due to sample code from an AMD library (Score:3)
"No time. Gotta crunch. Got until sunday midnight or boss is kicking me out. Won't come home over the weekend." -- Text from developer to his wife. Other wives sued. She left. He got fired anyway.
Not this exact thing, but something very similar happened a few years back with EA.
Don't give your money to thugs. It may not affect you directly, but it affects those who would otherwise affect your life for the better.
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Having worked on MMO platforms and video games, I can tell you the misery of working 800 hours of overtime in a year to support policing/EMS dispatching and mobile apps was not as miserable as what I lived and saw as a game dev. I have subsequently worked on another platform for online gaming and felt the same way there. And phone app devs are constantly crunched brutally because of the small budgets everyone expects to spend on a phone app.
The video game industry preys on young devs and brutally treats alm
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The funny part is that GPUOpen is... AMD's.
Looks like the trend of AMD's software side torpedoing their own hardware continues. You'd think that sample implementation would account for AMD use cases.
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Reminds me of IBM packaging early PCs with Windows licenses when they had OS/2 and it was arguably a better OS in many respects.
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The funny part is that GPUOpen is... AMD's.
Looks like the trend of AMD's software side torpedoing their own hardware continues. You'd think that sample implementation would account for AMD use cases.
It's nothing of the sort. The AMD code is well documented and says specifically what it will do and specifically says to instead profile performance properly. Now we have here a demonstrated case of developers not giving a shit, not reading documentation. How do you think sample code fixing this problem will go? You're just moving the edge cases around.
The answer is, as it usually is, RTFM.
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And here's the reason why AMD software sucked for such a long time. Just to code for it, you need to RTFM. While you're on a budget and a deadline.
All while intel's primary advantage is that invested into code that doesn't need that as far as it can be done. If they give you sample code, it just works on intel machines.
It's a problem that AMD has started to really fight in the recent years, so I am hoping that this is simply a legacy problem that will eventually go away. Else, we'll continue with the bad ca
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And here's the reason why AMD software sucked for such a long time. Just to code for it, you need to RTFM.
Don't be daft. What AMD lists in the manual is common sense and applies just as much to Intel. The Intel code has exactly the same issues as AMD's code. The difference is the developers likely had Intel machines and optimised the problem out thanks to testing.
AMD had a problem on the GPU/Driver side, but that's almost in pre-Ryzen days. You're digging up ancient history while excusing developers for not doing basic QC. And I had to quit and reload that game yesterday because an NPC refused to acknowledge I
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So we're partially in agreement. Like I said above:
>It's a problem that AMD has started to really fight in the recent years, so I am hoping that this is simply a legacy problem that will eventually go away. Else, we'll continue with the bad case of "AMD works in software that is done really well, and be hit and miss in overwhelming majority of software that you as a user couldn't afford if it was done really well".
But...
>excusing developers for not doing basic QC
"If they did the QC, you couldn't affor
Reminds me of why I never "buy" games anymore. (Score:2)
Buddy of mine had "bought" (meaning: licensed) GTA3: San Andreas, back then. Proper box with a disc from the store.
There were three ways it could crash before even entering the main menu. And on all nVidia cards, one of the three vertices of every triangle was at a random location.
My version that I got at the usual bays, ran flawlessly.
He had to go on GameCopyWorld, to get the zero-day patches that made it work. And for that it had to be cracked.
I laughed in his face all night.
How on Earth this could get re
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In the real world the people proving the money have expectations of delivery deadlines and ROI. It's an adult thing to recognize that such things exist.
Not every company can be a Valve where there is unlimited private funding available. Maybe they should be, but people would need to vote with their wallets to make it happen.
Now if they can just fix the PS4 crashing (Score:2)
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This has nothing to do with Intel's compiler, this is caused by a bug in an AMD-supplied library written shortly after Zen 1's release, when SMT performance was poor: https://github.com/GPUOpen-Lib... [github.com]
While I admire the developers (Score:1)