How low can you go? Cyberpunk’s minimum specs are quite obtainable,
provided you’ve bought a decent gaming PC in the last 5 years. But I’m going lower
than that! The Ryzen 2200G is a 4 core processor with built-in graphics. I’d say the processor
is roughly on-par with Cyberpunk’s minimum requirements of an i5 3570K, while the graphics
card is significantly below what’s needed.
If you’re going to be playing Cyberpunk on a slow PC, you can use the low preset which
drops everything to lowest. It looks bad, and flat, because things no longer have the
proper shading- you can see how it compares with medium preset here, and I think you’ll
agree, medium’s the standard you should be aiming for to get an acceptable visual
quality in this game. But low is at least runnable on most PCs. In my case, however,
I went lower still. And this is when FidelityFX becomes your best friend! Down at the bottom
of the graphics menu are 2 different settings for it which you can choose between. The first
lets you specify a framerate you want to hit. The second just chooses a resolution below
the one you’re playing at, then relies on FidelityFX to try and make it look as nice
as it can.
This is what Cyberpunk looks like at lowest settings, with FidelityFX on the lowest resolution
scaling possible. At 360p, the game is beyond fuzzy; it’s virtually unplayable. I could
barely read the road ahead of me when driving, and when walking about the city I could count
the pixels and see weird trails behind everything. But at least the framerate’s smooth, right?
…Well, this was recorded on my Geforce 3080. I didn’t try to capture the screen on my
2200G because this system needs every frame it can get. And currently, my video-capture
card is in the wash. So instead, here’s what the screen looks like when the 2200G’s
running on these lowest, lowest settings. Ignore the weird rainbow banding across the
screen. And the disgusting blobs scattered across it. Instead, look at the disgusting
blobs behind it. What you’re seeing here is Cyberpunk, at lowest settings, at 360p.
HOPEFULLY you’re on a system faster than my 2200G. Because even with all of these features
to help it, the 2200G was unable to hit 60 FPS even with lowest everything!
But if you find yourself in the same situation as I am here, don’t lose hope. Instead,
you should just accept you’re not going to reach 60 FPS and instead aim to hit 30.
Although this processor should technically meet Cyberpunk’s minimum specs, I believe
it was bottlenecking this PC, preventing it from reaching 60 FPS, and being the limiting
factor when in busy city settings. But in a way this is good, since it means I can actually
up the resolution and quality settings and the result won’t be a lot slower!
This is what the game looks like at medium preset, 75% resolution scaling. It’s bordering
on being playable quality now. The city segments are the most demanding bits of the game, so
here’s what the 2200G looks like running it in this manner.
Here are the benchmarks for the 3 different runs that I did.
Bench 1 is in the desert- the least demanding of the runs. Bench 2 is around your home apartment,
and is relatively taxing once there are people everywhere. And bench 3 is a trip through
a busy city street and is THE most demanding of the 3. Apart from in this last one, the
game remained above 30 FPS when at low settings. With framerates this low, you might think
I’d recommend sticking to the lowest settings. But I don’t- the move from 50% scaling to
75% makes a big difference, visually. It’s the difference between not being clear enough
to be worth playing, to -still not being good- but being just about clear enough to get by
with. And then the next jump up, from low to medium preset, might result in an equally
large framerate drop, finally going below 30 FPS in all areas of the game that I tested.
But again, visually it makes a huge difference, transforming it from a Playstation 3 game
to looking more like… an early Playstation 4 one.
The one thing that stands out here is how the framerate doesn’t drop at all when upping
the resolution in the last benchmark. This is proof that it’s completely CPU limited
here. Would you rather have 26 FPS at low settings, or 23 FPS at medium? It’s pretty
obvious it’s worth the hit to get better visuals here.
But I felt the CPU bottleneck a bit in all of the tests. Even though the AVERAGE framerate
hangs above 30, it isn’t ‘smooth’. There are drops whenever new scenery is loaded in,
and at these times, while the game doesn’t ‘freeze’, it does noticeably ‘chug’
– and this is something you’ll have to put up with, even at lowest settings. And
I’m running this on an SSD, so I don’t think it’s because I’m running the game
on a slow hard drive or anything like that. But it’s because of this generally sluggish
performance that that I think ‘well, if the game isn’t perfect at lowest, I might
as well sacrifice a bit more to make it acceptable, visually’.
When the game’s so focused around driving and shooting, I don’t think any of these
are acceptable. The 2400G might fare better thanks to its 8 threads and more Vega graphics
cores, but I think even that would struggle to deliver smooth framerates when in the game’s
busier areas. Sorry, 2200G, looks like Cyberpunk is one game I can’t recommend being played
on you. Why am I humanising a CPU.
The take-away from this isn’t so much if you should run this game on a 2200G, because
very clearly you shouldn’t. It’s more that, if your PC is slow, at least try running
it at 720p, 75% scaling and medium preset before going any lower, since going below
these settings disintegrates the game’s visuals enough to make it no longer worth
bothering with. I would suggest going to a busy area in the game, locking the framerate
to 30 and see what the experience is like and by going from there.
In my next video I hope to test more powerful graphics cards that are still below the minimum
spec for this game. I’ll be testing these in 2 different PCs- the first will be using
the 2200G as the CPU to see if it’s still CPU-limited. And then I’ll test it on a
super-fast CPU to see how much of a difference that makes to the experience.
Out of curiosity, this is how 50% scaling with FidelityFX compares with DLSS Performance
mode. I don’t know the exact resolution of this, but historically, performance mode
has been somewhere around 50% scaling. I can’t say for sure that these 2 are running at the
exact same base resolution, but what you CAN see here is that DLSS a huge improvement visually.
It might not pass for 1080p, but the image quality is now detailed and coherent enough
to look well beyond the low resolution it’s based on. AMD SHOULD be announcing something
similar to DLSS soon- hopefully- though how effective it’ll be, what it will be supported
on, how it’ll actually work, and WHEN it’ll be coming out, are all speculation right now.
But it would be here, in the APU and ultra-budget gaming market, that it would be of most benefit.