Wondering if your PC can play Cyberpunk 2077 with a thousand-dollar plus upgrade? The answer is … it depends.
The official Cyberpunk 2077 finally confirmed the minimum and recommended requirements for CD Projekt Red’s sci-fi RPG. And if you were wondering whether you’d have to upgrade, that depends on how well balanced your system is.
The first interesting tidbit is that, minimum or recommended, CD Projekt recommends Cyberpunk 2077 be installed onto an SSD. The minimum requirements say “70GB HDD”, but adds “SSD recommended” immediately after. That’s basically code for “this game will run on a regular platter drive, but seriously, don’t”.
It’s interesting because if the SSD makes that much of a difference even to the minimum PC spec, how are the current gen Xbox and PlayStation consoles going to fare? Both the base Xbox One and PlayStation 4 are equipped with slow-ass platter drives, and so were the mid-gen One X and PS4 Pro refreshes. Some fans have customised their consoles with hybrid drives or gigantic SSDs. The difference hasn’t traditionally been that enormous, and it’s certainly not worth doing this close to the PS5 and Xbox Series S/X launch.
So if you were looking for reasons to justify trading in your old consoles for the next gen, Cyberpunk 2077‘s performance might be the reason to do it. But the PC side has another interesting note. 12GB RAM is the recommended spec for PCs, which might be a problem for the almost 40 per cent of PCs on Steam that have 8GB RAM or less.
C:>systeminfo /u 2.0.7.7cyberpunk /p ******
Loading Processor Information…
Loading Memory Information…
Loading Video Card Information…
Saving data to: c:cp77hardware_requirements.info
Display now? y/n
Y pic.twitter.com/bhfDa51gkd— Cyberpunk 2077 (@CyberpunkGame) September 18, 2020
CD Projekt recommends having either at GTX 1060 — a fairly recent GPU — or at least an AMD Radeon R9 Fury. Those are cards from 2015 and 2016 respectively —the R9 Fury was often benched against the GTX 980 Ti.
If you need it all in text form, here it is:
Cyberpunk 2077 Minimum PC Requirements
- OS: Windows 7 64-bit/Windows 10 64-bit
- CPU: i5-3570K / AMD FX-8310
- RAM: 8GB
- GPU: GTX 780 3GB or RX 470
- Hard Drive: 70GB (SSD recommended)
Cyberpunk 2077 Recommended PC Requirements
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit
- CPU: i7-4790 / Ryzen 3 3200G APU
- RAM: 12GB
- GPU: GTX 1060 6GB / AMD R9 Fury
- Hard Drive: 70GB SSD
That’ll certainly augur well for anyone about to splurge on the RTX 3070, 3080 or 3090 — or people who picked up the 20-series cards in the panic selling. But those with the mid-range AMD cards like the RX 5700 XT should do fine, too, although whether you’ll be capped to 1080p or 1440p is another question.
The real kicker will be for those on older PC rigs that don’t have SSDs. That’ll also be something worth checking when Cyberpunk 2077 launches in November: how much data does the game stream in at any given moment, and are there any performance benefits with NVMe drives vs. regular SSDs?
And just how rough is the experience on a regular platter drive — and base consoles? We’ll find out come November 19.
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