‘Cyberpunk 2077’ Patch 1.2 Mostly Helped PS4 Pro, But Other Consoles Lag Behind

Cyberpunk 2077’s patch 1.2 has been out for a week now, and Digital Foundry has done their testing to come up with a conclusion about how it affects the performance of the game on console, a big part of what it was meant to address.

CDPR’s main goal right now is to get the game back on the PlayStation Store, where it’s been banished since a week after launch. There are four versions of the game, the PS4 Pro version that is what PS5 uses, the Xbox One X version which is what Series X uses, and the base PS4 and Xbox One versions.

Digital Foundry’s testing has found that the console to gain the most was the PlayStation 4 Pro version, which was already the best-running version before this. Watch their video below, but I’ll have some highlights under that.

So, we have:

• In an effort to boost framerate, 1.2 actually made item/lighting pop-in worse on PS4 Pro while Xbox One X wasn’t affected as much.
• Low poly pop-in can still happen on NPCs, though less so with vehicles.
• Frame rate gain on PS4 Pro is deemed “remarkable,” up to an 8fps total gain. But it’s not perfect and there were still crashes.
• Xbox One X “still has major issues” and runs worse than the PS4 Pro version (as it did in previous testing). It has big “hitches” that drop FPS severely at times. Scoping in with your gun causes a drop in performance.
• “Limited” impact of patch 1.2 on base PS4 Some scenes run a little better, but it’s a couple FPS gain at the most. It’s a “struggle to even aim properly” with this version of the game during gunplay because of performance drops.
• Gains are “too small to register” on base Xbox One. It’s the worst performing version of the game.

In short, the major good news is for PS4 Pro which seems mostly locked to 30 fps despite a few crashes. But the last gen versions of the game, where the biggest problems have always been, are still quite bad, with performance even affecting gunplay. Progress is being made, but it’s unclear if it’s enough to impress Sony.

Sony’s main issues was A) mostly about refunds, as CDPR upset them by forcing them to enact a digital refund policy they didn’t previously have, just to accommodate requests for the broken game and B) the performance on base PS4, the majority of PlayStations in the wild by far, was the main issue, and if the game is still running relatively poorly there, not enough may have changed for them to put it back on the store. I’m not sure if they could put the PS4 Pro version back but not the base PS4 version, but I doubt they would do that. But this has created a situation where even the PS5, where the game runs pretty acceptably at this point, does not have a digital version of the game for sale because of all these other issues.

CDPR says they think Sony will let them back on soon, but a week later, we’ve heard nothing from Sony directly, and the game remains de-listed.

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