By this point in time, you’ve probably heard of the deeply problematic background behind Cyberpunk 2077. The game itself bears amazing visuals, deep RPG gameplay, and a stunning futuristic open world. However, the studio developing it, CD Projekt Red, just spent the better part of 2020 inviting incessant criticism. And for the most part, this is, unfortunately, totally warranted.
Cyberpunk 2077 went from a simple teased IP from the studio of the acclaimed Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, to one of the biggest AAA titles of the year. While the Witcher 3: Wild Hunt redefined open-world gaming and masterful writing, it also exemplified the developer’s commitment to player satisfaction. The few bugs present at launch gradually became ironed out over time with regular patches. In the months leading up to Cyberpunk 2077, the studio delayed the game’s launch thrice and broke their previous promise of no compulsory employee crunch.
However, the straw that broke the camel’s back isn’t all this. It is the unpolished, poorly optimized nature of the game itself. When your game makes even the new Nvidia RTX 3090 struggle to run at 60 FPS at 4K, you have a problem. Furthermore, players frequently encounter annoying and bizarre bugs and glitches. And on the console side, the game is so messy it’s nearly unplayable (click here to see how the developers allow for refunds).
PC players noticed that Cyberpunk 2077 runs less stably on AMD CPUs than Intel CPUs for some reason
Oddly enough, the game seems out to badger the hardware it’s running on. Whether your platform is the PS4 or high-end gaming PC, the game will trouble you. This is sadly almost ironic, given how much the developers try to even out the playing field. After all, they already promised free PS5 and Xbox Series X versions for players owning the last-gen versions. And, in the case of raytracing (currently restricted only to Nvidia’s RTX cards), they announced future implementation for AMD’s new lineup.
Recently, players on several Reddit threads all agreed on personal experiences running the game on different hardware. Almost all agreed that the game seemed to run at higher framerates when powered by an Intel CPU instead. Using various PC tools showed them that Cyberpunk 2077 on AMD CPUs disregards the multithreading capabilities. Most of the power went to the primary cores in the chip, leaving the secondary ones useless. Naturally, this means that any CPU-intensive parts of the game would stumble, due to the poor resource management.
We’ve mentioned it before, but it does seem that AMD is poised to overthrow Intel’s CPU monopoly. Their chips offer better processing speeds, higher core counts, and better power management. What’s more, the better thermal considerations ensure that throttling is less common on AMD chips than Intel chips, for the same tasks. However, in this case, something seemed to cause poor resource allocation in the AMD chips.
Reddit users discovered two possible explanations for the game’s inferior performance on AMD CPUs and devised fixes
As some put it, Intel is largely held as the standard for most computer processes these days. It’s kind of like how Coke is more synonymous with black soda than Pepsi is, across the world. In this case, it results in the game’s main code compiler specializing in Intel rather than AMD. The Intel C++ compiler optimizes performance across Intel chips but leads to performance drops in the 10-20% range for AMD ones. Although in all honestly this theory isn’t completely reliable, as some disagree with the effects Intel C++ has on games.
The more likely explanation is the use of the GPUOpen program. This tool essentially analyzes the executable file inbound from the game, and by default limits the maximum scheduled threads in AMD CPUs. That typically means that, unless this tool is tweaked, Intel chips get more threads for their processor. In the case of Cyberpunk 2077, CD Projekt Red should have modified the GPUOpen to allow for better performance on AMD chips.
So, we’ve taken the liberty here to detail their strategies to enabling fixes to Cyberpunk 2077 on AMD CPUs. The patches provided here, and here, come from different sources. However, they both aim to enable hyperthreading on the AMD CPUs, allowing for substantial improvements. In fact, these workarounds saw CPU core utilization go up by 50 to 70% with these simple steps.
- Install a third-party tool like HxD editor, and locate the .exe file for Cyberpunk 2077
This should be somewhere in the game’s root directory. If you don’t know how to find it, try right-clicking on your Cyberpunk 2077 desktop icon, and select View Location. Here you can see all of the essential data files. Just try not to move or delete anything you don’t understand, as this may bug your saved game. - Make a backup of the .exe file, and copy it into the HxD directory.
To make a backup, you can follow the instructions here. This will allow you to roll back to previous settings in case something goes wrong. - Use CTRL+F to enter edit column mode, and then select hex values to input.
- Enter the numbers 75 30 33 C9 B8 01 00 00 00 0F A2 8B C8 C1 F9 08, then Copy EB 30 33 C9 B8 01 00 00 00 0F A2 8B C8 C1 F9 08.
- Using the right-click, highlight the first code, and copy-paste it into the folder of the second one.
- Save your new settings
This way, you won’t have to reinput these hex values and tinker with your CPU settings again every time you want to play Cyberpunk 2077. While these above steps may seem quite daunting, the video below should help shed some light in case you get stuck somewhere.
Hopefully, this fix should help you set up your AMD chip and run Cyberpunk 2077 much more smoothly. Keep in mind that at some point this fix may not even remain necessary. CD Projekt Red has acknowledged several ongoing issues with the game and probably will rollout patches at some point in the future. Until then, enjoy the significant FPS and rendering boost your new Cyberpunk AMD CPU settings will net you.
For more on Cyberpunk 2077, AMD, and CD Projekt Red, stay tuned!