2 MIN READ TIME

TECH TALK

THE MOST ANTICIPATED GAME for years, Cyberpunk 2077 provides insight into all the modern complexities of game development. Hundreds of individuals worked for years to bring Night City to life, and while I appreciate much of the end result—despite the bugs and glitches—it’s clear developer and publisher CD Projekt Red made serious mistakes.
Jarred Walton

The company admitted as much, and in an unprecedented move, the game was pulled from the PlayStation store, and everyone who purchased it was offered a full refund. Microsoft likewise offered full refunds for Xbox One players. The PC release running on modern hardware still has some issues, but nothing so far that I’ve considered fully showstopping. Maybe I got lucky, but more likely is the fact that I’m drastically exceeding the official minimum recommended specs.

CD Projekt Red lists a relatively ancient Core i5-3570K or FX-8310 CPU, 8GB RAM, and a GTX 780 with 3GB of VRAM as the minimum hardware requirements. You’ll really want a newer GPU, and the GTX 1080 barely breaks 60fps at 1080p medium. Along with a decent graphics card, though, you’ll want a better CPU as well. The i5-3570K is a fourcore/four-thread Ivy Bridge CPU, never mind the AMD Bulldozer chips that never quite lived up to expectations. Bottom line: Things are going to be much worse trying to run a complex game like Cyberpunk 2077 on old hardware.

Night City is a sprawling metropolis, and you can drive from one end to the other without a single loading screen. Scaling that down to run on CPUs that launched over eight years ago is a recipe for disaster, but things really went wrong with the previous-gen consoles. CD Projekt Red knew the game had problems on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, but the holiday season was calling. However, it wasn’t ready, and I’m not sure it’s ever going to be a good experience on those consoles.

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Maximum PC
February 2021
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