Cyberpunk 2077 and Watch Dogs: Legion look amazing, but wow are they hard to run. Hopefully DLSS doesn’t become a requirement.
After years of waiting, Cyberpunk 2077 has finally arrived and the launch is, well, it’s a bit of a mess. Visual glitches, performance and social issues all plague this game – and some of the visual effects can physically harm some people, according to this report from Game Informer. I really haven’t played enough of Cyberpunk 2077 to comment on the content of the game, I’m only a couple of hours in. However, what I can say is that the game is extremely heavy to run, and I don’t like that I can’t turn everything up to max and get a buttery smooth 60 fps at 4K without thinking about it. There’s an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 in my machine – wasn’t Nvidia marketing this thing as an 8K gaming card? Cyberpunk 2077 hails from the same developer that indirectly got me into the hardware enthusiast world in the first place with The Witcher 2 a decade ago. When that game came out, I started overclocking and tinkering with my hardware to try and hit 60 fps at high settings. But the thing is, I didn’t have access to the high-end hardware I have right now. If memory serves correctly, I was running a rig with an Intel Core i5-2500K,4GB of RAM and an AMD Radeon HD 5870. This was in 2011, mind you, so this was a pretty solid mid-range build. Was totally able to play pretty much everything else at the time at 1080p, but I struggled with The Witcher 2. My roommate at the time had a PC that was way better than mine, and was able to max the game out, and I would just sit in their room and gawk at their screen while they played it on the big screen TV they inexplicably used as a monitor at the time. I was determined to get to the point where I could max it out at a good framerate. To this day, whenever I get a new graphics card in my personal machine, I still boot up The Witcher 2 with UberSampling just to see how it runs.
