Cyberpunk 2077 Gets Another PC Performance Boost With These Unofficial Config Tweaks
Cyberpunk 2077 is the talk of the town, and nobody should be the least bit surprised—this was, after all, one of the most anticipated games of the year. it was also a long time coming with numerous delays. Unfortunately, bugs still managed to hitch a ride, as they always seem to do (especially on higher profile games). CD Projekt Red will undoubtedly keep the patches coming, but in the short term, users are taking matters into their own hands with performance tweaks of their own.
We have seen this already with a HEX edit that, with a simple change of a small piece of code, can compel Cyberpunk 2077 to take advantage of AMD's simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) support on Ryzen processors. This is not something the game does out of the box, which means there is some potentially untapped horsepower that could improve performance and bump up minimum frame-counts in busier scenes.
There's also a mod available that we wrote about yesterday, which does essentially the same thing without the need to edit anything, plus it provides a few other minor fixes. The advantage of the mod is that the changes stick around after applying official patches, whereas the HEX edit method would need to be repeated, assuming a forthcoming patch does not fix the SMT issue.
But wait, there's more! Reddit user ThePhoenixRoyal claims that making some key config file edits can lend itself to a 2X framerate improvement. I suspect that is an over ambitious claim, but perhaps there is something to be gained from the user's tweaks. Apparently it worked well on their system, which consists of an Intel Core i7-4790K processor, GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics card, 32GB of RAM, and pair of SSDs.
"I was shocked that I was only averaging 30 - 50fps (lowest settings possible,1080p, 70 FOF, no extra jazz) at best depending on the amount of objects I was looking at. For someone that is used to playing at 1440p @ 144hz, this was heart-wrenchingly bad performance and half an agony to play. So I took a look at CyberPunk in Process Lasso and noticed that both my CPU and GPU always lounge around at 40-60% and that my GPU consumed a humble 100 Watts. Something felt horribly off. It makes ZERO sense that my CPU and GPU barely do anything but at the same time my performance is horses**t," the user wrote.
Doing some digging, ThePhoenixRoyal claims to have discovered that the configuration files allocate the same amount of system memory and graphics memory on PC as the game does on consoles, as shown in the image above.
"Take a look at PoolCPU and PoolGPU. These values are the same as the other platforms. This looks off. So I decided to give it a try and just screw around with this config. So based off my rig I assigned some values that made a little more sense to me," the user wrote.
The user changed the PoolCPU value to 16GB an the PoolGPU value to 11GB. In doing so, they said their CPU "finally woke the f**k up and started kicking in second gear." Instead of working at 40-60 percent usage, the user claims it went up to 85-95 percent usage after the tweak. Additionally, they saw their GPU power consumption go from 100W to 230W on average.
This, the user says, had a dramatic impact on their loading times (down from 20 seconds to 2 seconds) and being able to maintain 60 frames per second at high settings at 1440p with 80 FOV.
There are some caveats. The user notes that the changes in their guide can crash Cyberpunk 2077 and Windows. And your mileage may vary. I seriously doubt anyone is going to see anywhere near double the performance from these or any tweaks, and some in the thread note they saw no difference at all. On the flip side, they apparently worked for some. So hey, it's something to try if you are feeling experimental.
