A select few in the gaming community had the opportunity to gain a Cyberpunk 2077 preview build. This was to test the highly anticipated open-world AAA game at CD Projekt RED.
While some had access to the game through the GeForce NOW platform, other folks at PC Games Hardware got to play on an actual PC at a local event.
What was the outcome?
The performance report from the German publication was concerning multiple levels. The preview presumably ran at 1080p with DLSS 2.0 activated as we covered on the NVIDIA’s new feature integration and some raytracing effects activated on a computer. It’s good you know the computer was powered by the robust RTX 2080Ti graphics card.
Here’s what they (PC game hardware) had to say:
We play in Full HD – a fact that we first have to digest a bit, given the RTX 2080 Ti in the Alienware presentation computer, there should be a little more in the pixel density. Also, DLSS is activated, so the internal render resolution is again less than 1,920 × 1080 pixels. But ray tracing is also active, in our preview version in the form of shadows, ambient occlusion and indirect lighting (Ray Traced Diffuse Illumination). As we have also known since our Gamescom 2018 impressions of the raytracing titles that appeared later, they run much better after the release – whether it is Battlefield 5, Metro Exodus, or Shadow of the Tomb Raider. The already integrated DLSS already makes a very good impression. Even for Full HD, the picture on the huge 65-inch telly looked relatively sharp, even though the preview version had chromatic aberration and film grain switched on. The graphics menu was not yet integrated in our build.
From experience with DLSS 2.0, we know the rendering can be as low as 540p while with a 1080p output resolution. However, it’s not certain if that was the case with PC Gamers Cyberpunk 2077 preview.
Moreover, as explained earlier, the raytracing effects are not in this build, and activating them would certainly make the game more demanding on any system. With all these caveats, the frame rate still dropped from 60fps to 30fps in an instance as explained in PC games hardware expose:
But at least at one point, the performance has dropped to ~ 30 fps, or even just below it, I could see that and noticed it on the controller. Also, the game is often jerky, especially when driving. The rest of the time, it was okay, but in my opinion, it only relatively rarely hit 60 fps or more.
However, this does not imply that the Cyberpunk 2077 preview was not worth the sweat, as the article published by PC Games Hardware depicts that it looks better than formerly released footage. This is a big win for CD Projekt and a big thanks to the ray-traced effects. (Ambient occlusion, shadows, diffuse illumination)
Still, there’s more for CD Projekt RED left to optimize. For instance, while the RTX 2080Ti will be able to run the game at 4K resolution with DLSS 2.0 and other raytracing features active, there seems to be a little bit of distortion even at 1080p currently.
While we wait for CD Projekt RED to fully optimize the game, always check for updates in-between the five-month time frame.
