Cyberpunk 2077 isn’t running to its full potential on AMD processors, or at least that’s the case going by a good deal of online feedback.
VideoCardz unearthed a report on Reddit into the issue, which appears to revolve around SMT not working – that’s simultaneous multi-threading, and the apparent bug means that AMD CPUs are only using their physical cores, rather than the full amount of threads available to them.
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So for example, with a Ryzen 3700X, that’s an 8-core processor but with 16-threads, meaning that if the physical 8-cores aren’t being fully utilized, you can effectively have more cores (‘virtual cores’ as it were) with simultaneous multi-threading (up to 16) – and therefore better performance. However, with SMT seemingly not working properly in Cyberpunk 2077, only 8-cores are being used at most.
This has been pointed out in some reviews as well, along with a good number of AMD CPU owners online on Reddit and elsewhere. The problem doesn’t affect Intel’s chips and its hyper-threading (which is Intel’s name for SMT).
Hacking the EXE
There is an apparent solution as the tech site points out, as outlined by UnhingedDoork, but it involves messing with the game’s .exe file, and that’s best left alone if you’re not tech-savvy and fully confident in what you’re doing.
If these reports are correct, and this is a widespread issue, the Cyberpunk 2077 devs will hopefully be on a fix pretty swiftly (or will at least inform us as to what’s going on here). In an apology for the state of the game at release, CD Projekt Red has already tweeted that “PC gamers will also be getting regular updates and fixes improving the game”.
There are anecdotal stories of sizeable performance boosts after applying the aforementioned unofficial workaround. One gamer on the above Reddit thread notes: “5600X here, this fix is incredible. I stay at 60+ FPS even in crowded areas now, areas which used to drop down into the 40s.”
And there are plenty of other stories of at least 10 fps (frames per second) boosts, and in some cases much bigger 20 fps or so gains, with gameplay exhibiting less stuttering, too, according to some folks – and CPU utilization noticeably leaping up (as the extra virtual cores are brought into play).
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