Cyberpunk 2077's Performance On Base PS4 Is "Unacceptable" In Digital Foundry Analysis

Cyberpunk 2077 has finally launched this week, but if you're planning to play CD Projekt Red's latest game on older consoles then you could be in for a shock. Digital Foundry has examined how Cyberpunk 2077's first three hours perform on the base model PS4 and the PS4 Pro after patch 1.02 has been installed, and has detailed a compromised experience on those platforms. In fact, it's one that can be nearly unplayable. You may want to hold off for now if you're on these systems.

On the base PS4, game performance "mostly" reaches a resolution of 720p, but the 30fps performance target is prone to dropping to 15fps during more intense sequences. "There's just so much less detail," Digital Foundry's John Linneman noted of Night City's car and NPC count. This results in Cyberpunk 2077 having frequent slowdowns, stuttering, and a messy visual presentation according to Digital Foundry's analysis.

"It's about 45 minutes into the game when you realize things have taken a very sour turn and this is just not playable anymore," Linneman said. "It's this set-piece moment where you're driving down through the inner city and you're in a shootout car chase and it just cannot run. It's not just that it's running at 20fps, under 20fps, but it stutters as well as it streams in the world."

"For me, this is not acceptable. I would never want to play the game this way. It's terrible," Linneman concluded.

The PS4 Pro fares slightly better though, reaching a 1080p resolution most of the time, although it also dropped to 18fps during sequences such as an alleyway brawl. Cyberpunk 2077 is still far more playable on PS4 Pro when compared to the base PS4, and on PS5 the game is capable of reaching a 60fps presentation when run through that system via backwards compatibility. Digital Foundry also expects the Xbox One consoles to have similar results when it tests the game on those platforms. In our experience, when running on Xbox Series X, it runs well enough to be playable. However, we did encounter bugs nearly immediately.

"Cyberpunk 2077 is phenomenally buggy," our Cyberpunk 2077 review reads. "I played a pre-release build that was updated during the review period, and there's a day-one patch planned as well, but the scale of technical issues is too large to reasonably expect immediate fixes. I encountered some kind of bug on every mission I went on, from more common, funnier ones like characters randomly T-posing to several complete crashes. I didn't notice much of an improvement after the update, either."