Patching for the console versions – which have proved far more problematic than the PC incarnation, with some nasty performance issues and crashes – was promised before the year was out, and CD Projekt has stayed true to that word.
You’ll find the release notes for version 1.05 with the full list of changes here, and there are a whole bunch of improvements across-the-board for all platforms.
That includes fixing crashes and making ‘multiple stability improvements’, plus there’s also a bunch of work on repairing glitches with quests, with some quest-breaking bugs remedied.
There are also solutions for some graphics issues, including bits of the interface overlapping incorrectly, and a few other fixes for the UI, such as the cure for a problem whereby the crosshairs stay on the screen after you’ve put your weapon away.
Blur begone
The majority of this applies to console and PC gamers alike, but there are also some platform-specific measures. The big one for consoles is the improvement of image sharpness when the ‘film grain’ and ‘chromatic aberration’ visual effects are turned on, so there’s less of the blurriness that many have been complaining about since Cyberpunk 2077’s launch (among many other things, ahem).
No doubt the developer is hoping that this will encourage console gamers not to turn off these effects, as many have been doing by all accounts, but we shall see (chromatic aberration seems to have a fair old performance hit from what we’ve seen, and the film grain effect is very much a subjective thing as to whether you’ll appreciate it or not, anyway).
The big PC-specific change is the solution for the simultaneous multi-threading bug which has affected the owners of some AMD Ryzen processors, slowing down Cyberpunk 2077’s frame rate by a considerable amount.
With confirmation of that problem comes a clarification – that only quad-core and 6-core Ryzen CPUs need a fix, with chips that have 8-cores or more already working as intended.
The patch notes say: “Optimized default core/thread utilization for 4-core and 6-coreAMD Ryzen processors … This change was implemented in cooperation with AMD and based on tests on both sides indicating that performance improvement occurs only on CPUs with 6 cores and less.”
PC gamers also get a fix for a problem whereby ray-traced reflections seem overly bright in comparison to the surrounding environment, and the PC patch will be coming ‘soon’. As mentioned, hotfix 1.05 is already live for console gamers.
As we’ve already heard, major patches for Cyberpunk 2077 are expected to arrive in January and February as well.
