CD Projekt's Cyberpunk 2077 Update 2.0 + Phantom Liberty Expansion Thread

[racofer]

Yeah, now that concerns me a wee bit... I'm running an 8-core/8-thread 9700K and my cooling's less-than-stellar. If it really is that hard on the CPU, I might have to give it a pass, at least for now.

On that twitter thread someone asks if their 8700k will still manage Cyberpunk, and he says it should be good. Given that the 9700k always performed better in games than the 8700k, then you should also be good.

 

[Gargaune]

Damnit, I fell for the marketing...

So that's my second multicore test. 550 points, did a single pass in 10 minutes, CPU package hovering around 91C with the individual cores in the (very) high 80s, managed to snap this screencap just as the render wrapped up. But, frankly, I don't know what 100% benchmark app result is supposed to mean for Cyberpunk.

On a sidenote - Jesus Christ, these Maxon dudes have some serious pipes! I know I've got real gigabit internet, but I've never seen anyone actually capable of serving me a full 100MBps on a single DL. I actually downloaded it twice because I didn't see the progress bar the first time and I thought something went wrong.

On that twitter thread someone asks if their 8700k will still manage Cyberpunk, and he says it should be good. Given that the 9700k always performed better in games than the 8700k, then you should also be good.

It's the heat I'm worried about, it's been a bugbear of mine with CBP from the start since my cooling solution's subpar. It got pretty much resolved once I slapped a new intake fan in there and swapped to a beefier 4070, but I'll have to see what it means with these supposed new system requirements.

 

[Perkel]

Yeah, I doubt a patch and the 32GB expansion that runs on a PS5 are going to be so amazing it's going to melt your computers. Stop falling for hype and upgrade your toasters, btw.

PS5 is packing RTX2080 grade gpu with 16GB VRAM (which is more than 2080) and ryzen2xxx 8core (though at lower clocks)
Even today that is great gaming pc. And that is not considering optimizations possible on closed hardware.

 

[AwesomeButton]

So I wasn't just imagining things? I always thought I saw DLSS result in slightly higher CPU load.

What happens is your GPU is rendering frames at a lower resolution, and you get closer to becoming CPU-bound for your maximum framerate. If you were GPU-bound before turning on DLSS, your CPU load will surely increase once you turn DLSS on (and are no longer GPU-bound as a result).

 

[AwesomeButton]

But, frankly, I don't know what 100% benchmark app result is supposed to mean for Cyberpunk.

Doesn't mean anything for a real game. He asks people to run a cinebench in order to check how their cooling performs, so that there are no complaints "the game runs like shit on my X CPU" when their CPUs are actually throttling.

It's the heat I'm worried about, it's been a bugbear of mine with CBP from the start since my cooling solution's subpar. It got pretty much resolved once I slapped a new intake fan in there and swapped to a beefier 4070, but I'll have to see what it means with these supposed new system requirements.

Noctua Nh-d15 / Trooper SE case here

 

[Tyrr]

Can't wait for all the "My PC went up in flames!" stories after the patch release.

 

[AwesomeButton]

New stream coming, likely the 2.0 announcement, or release:

 

[Crispy]

Fedora Master, just curious. Why would you want him to stop posting? That's a p. important announcement for this game, isn't it?

Edit: Fuck you, Modron.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Fedora should just unfollow the thread instead.

 

[Gargaune]

What happens is your GPU is rendering frames at a lower resolution, and you get closer to becoming CPU-bound for your maximum framerate. If you were GPU-bound before turning on DLSS, your CPU load will surely increase once you turn DLSS on (and are no longer GPU-bound as a result).

I see. I was wondering whether DLSS itself might result in a CPU overhead.

Noctua Nh-d15 / Trooper SE case here

Well, you can have a skim here if you wanna get the nature of my problem. Self-inflicted... but it looks good.

 

[WhiskeyWolf]

I have a i9-9900 with an old type Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo (single fan). When I ran Cinebench on all 8 cores - max load, 125 Watt - I just barely managed to reach 80°C on my CPU when the test ended. I don't think I ever seen this CPU run anywhere near 90°C, so I'm good. But yeah, I highly doubt LP will somehow stress test the CPU while I play it, but having use of all my cores in any meaningful capacity is something I never heard a game do.

 

[Bad Sector]

If you have your own engine you're gonna have to vet new devs on both it and the code of the game itself instead of just the code alone.

It isn't really an issue in practice, almost all the studios i worked at had custom engines. It takes a bit to learn the ins and outs but that is easily dwarfed by the time you'll actually work on something. It is also much easier to modify the existing engine and tool code when you do not have to worry about conflicts from future updates and you can tailor the tools to the workflow of the people who work on it.

 

[KVVRR]

If you have your own engine you're gonna have to vet new devs on both it and the code of the game itself instead of just the code alone.

It isn't really an issue in practice, almost all the studios i worked at had custom engines. It takes a bit to learn the ins and outs but that is easily dwarfed by the time you'll actually work on something. It is also much easier to modify the existing engine and tool code when you do not have to worry about conflicts from future updates and you can tailor the tools to the workflow of the people who work on it.

Why else would they swap to Unreal though? The REDengine seems to work as well as it does and I doubt the people working at CDPR would be more experienced on Unreal than it.

 

[AwesomeButton]

If you have your own engine you're gonna have to vet new devs on both it and the code of the game itself instead of just the code alone.

It isn't really an issue in practice, almost all the studios i worked at had custom engines. It takes a bit to learn the ins and outs but that is easily dwarfed by the time you'll actually work on something. It is also much easier to modify the existing engine and tool code when you do not have to worry about conflicts from future updates and you can tailor the tools to the workflow of the people who work on it.

Why else would they swap to Unreal though? The REDengine seems to work as well as it does and I doubt the people working at CDPR would be more experienced on Unreal than it.

Not only easier to hire and interview new people, but also much easier to let go people when knowhow is not restricted to your organization.

A company with the size of CDPR has not only yearly and quarterly targets for hiring but also projections for how many people will leave.

Much more value is leaving your company if your technology stack is restricted to your current and past employees than if it isn't.

Welcome to the corporate world, employees are a "resource", and the employer is striving to reduce their human capital value, in case of losing them. It's quite a nuisance we have to still allow people to leave companies. Best if we could just chain them to the desks to preserve value, or if we could wipe out their brains and then upload the knowhow when we hire new ones...

Meanwhile gamers should enjoy the last moddable CDPR game. With the loss of moddability, product quality drops as well and this will impact sales somewhat, but I guess the corporate management didn't put this into their spreadsheets. Or if they did, they calculated that at least the first batch of games won't be as affected by loss of longevity due to lack of modding. And after the first batch is out, there will be at least a few years for the PR machine and "community managers" to spin the story as "it's actually better you can't mod games any more", "more stable, more optimized, fewer bugs", expect all sorts of schlock.

 

[Fedora Master]

Fedora should just unfollow the thread instead.

I'm not following the thread.

 

[Perkel]

Why else would they swap to Unreal though? The REDengine seems to work as well as it does and I doubt the people working at CDPR would be more experienced on Unreal than it.

Because management is scapegoating engine team for release failure. Otherwise they would have to point fingers at themselves for asking them to deliver GTA+RPG on engine that was custom build to flat mediaeval rpg in few years with production going at the same time.

Now with change in engine they can fire their engine team and proclaim they fixed issue that caused disaster launch while patting themselves on the back.

Can't wait for them to realize that the amount of time needed to create custom tools that allowed them to make their games in first places have to be repeated AGAIN because UE5 isn't rpg engine

---------------

Their official tune is that this will allow them to hire better. Which means they want to branch out more toward english devs rather than hire poles.

I already said it years ago that head management staff are literally typical "Janusz" examples. Best explained by heads actively learning mandarin language and releasing F2P gwent and other side projects.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Can't wait for them to realize that the amount of time needed to create custom tools that allowed them to make their games in first places have to be repeated AGAIN because UE5 isn't rpg engine

Didn't they already encounter that fact with the unnamed Witcher spinoff game that the last we heard of was that it was radically cut in scope?

that head management staff are literally typical "Janusz" examples.

Very funny that while they've drawn parallels with Rockstar as a model for their development, they chose not to follow their "model" in developing their own tech. Short term goals override long term.

 

[Daedalos]

imma re-play the gaem with 2.0 path... any1 else?
I haven't played the game since 2020, so I guess it's time. Loved the game first time around despite the bugs and cut content shit.
Not sure what path I wanna go, hacker maybe? seemingly been reworked/buffed.

or stealth/combination

Quite excited to see how PL will feature into the endgame and the affect on the ending.

I'm guessing at the minimum, getting johnny AND yourself to survive the engram will be a path so u dont have to choose or some shit.

 

[S.H.O.D.A.N.]

Didn't they already envounter that fact with the unnamed Witcher spinoff game that the last we heard of was that it was radically cut in scope?

The studio they bought for the purpose of making that game had 60 devs, best case scenario. Worst case, twenty of those were in HR and related parasitics.

I'm assuming they expected Boston based devs to do Polish hours on a project that would normally require double the workforce. Heard the difference in reconciling different work ethics, for lack of a better term, had been a problem even in the mothership studio.

 

[Perkel]

Very funny that while they've drawn parallels with Rockstar as a model for their development, they chose not to follow their "model" in developing their own tech. Short term goals override long term.

Actually C77 was supposed to be their GTA moment. This is why there was supposed to be separate multiplayer cb77 game much like gta online is pretty much separate game.

 

[Justicar]

 

[Bad Sector]

Why else would they swap to Unreal though? The REDengine seems to work as well as it does and I doubt the people working at CDPR would be more experienced on Unreal than it.

TBH i don't know. When i was at CDPR it was considered a milestone for the company that they had their own engine, i remember one studio-wide meeting where the higher ups outright said that having REDengine was a goal that brought them independence and they achieved that with Witcher 2. Switching away from it feels bizarre. Of course the company is very different than those days (that meeting was a decade ago and i left in 2015).

A tongue-in-cheek guess i had when i learned about the decision to switch to Unreal was that they ran out of engine programmers as they had a huge team turnover - in Poland it was considered a sort of "rite of passage" to work for a bit in CDPR and then move on to other companies :-P.

But perhaps a more likely scenario was what Perkel wrote:

Because management is scapegoating engine team for release failure.

 

[Perkel]

TBH i don't know. When i was at CDPR it was considered a milestone for the company that they had their own engine, i remember one studio-wide meeting where the higher ups outright said that having REDengine was a goal that brought them independence and they achieved that with Witcher 2. Switching away from it feels bizarre. Of course the company is very different than those days (that meeting was a decade ago and i left in 2015).

The whole custom/industry engine thing is something i observe for decades at this point and frankly it is pretty clear that you need your own engine at some point if your games want to be special.

Ton of people jumping unreal right now due to lumen and ninite hoping that they can just hire cinematics guys and put cinematics grade assets into their games and somehow it will work out. It looks so nice on power point after all.

If anything it looks to me like the best way to cut down costs in typical "janusz move" much like it happened with UE3.

 

[AwesomeButton]

If anything it looks to me like the best way to cut down costs in typical "janusz move"

That's what worries me too. Whenever I've discounted some explanation with "they can't be that dumb", nine times out of ten I've been wrong.

 

[Vyvian]

He walked that overhype tweet back a bit in a follow up.