CP2077 engine is designed for 60hz monitors only!

[bofhnexus]

Some background: I've been doing stuff with computers for over 30 years. Wrote my first "game" at the age of 5. Okay, it was just a CYOA made with print and choice commands in BASIC, but hey! Since then i've dealt with most areas of computer software and hardware. Worked as a technician, network admin, programmer, interface designer, betatester... you name it.

 

So troubleshooting performance in a game should be a piece of cake for me right? Nope. I've now spent over 20 hours troubleshooting CP2077 performance bottlenecks and crashes, and only now am i starting to understand the real causes and solutions.

 

To be fair: I probably made it extra hard for me, by running CP2077 on low mid-end hardware on an unsupported OS (yes folks, DX12 works on win8 - all the excuses from microsoft are BS. There's no real obstacles with the OS or kernel - only artificial barriers MS put in. Remove the barriers, and DX12 works just fine, and much faster than DX12on7).

 

Another mistake i made was, to start playing with a boatload of mods and config tweaks from the get-go. So when things went wrong, it was like searching for the needle in the haystack.

 

But you're not reading this, to learn how a comtek veteran made every beginner mistake in modding. You're hear to learn something actually new. Something you could benefit from. So let's get right to it.

 

The symptoms:

On my setup (6-core Ryzen with SMT disabled, 16GB RAM, SSD, GForce 1660 TI with 6GB VRAM, monitor with 240hz refreshrate, 1920x1080 res) the game ran smoothly in the badlands, but the monent i enter densely populated areas, FPS start to drop increasingly, until eventually the game crashes to desktop.

 

GPU too slow? Nope, on low graphics settings the GPU actually powers down, since it has nothing to do. Texture swapping in VRAM? Nope: VRAM load never goes above 75%. And RAM usage is just a meager 4GB of my 16GB total. What a waste! Hello red-engine: Theres 10GB sitting around unused. Why not cache stuff instead constantly streaming s*** the moment i just TURN by 20 degrees on the spot, without even moving? But more on red-engine later. Teaser: It's a piece of s***! No wonder CDPR wants to switch engines ASAP. It's not about fancy graphics effects, but their engine being fundamentally flawed. And i mean more flawed than the infamous bethesda engine. That's not just incompetence, but art. But again: More on this later.

 

Instead my bottleneck seemed to be the CPU: All cores saturated at 90% load. Now wait a minute: I said FPS tanks in populated areas, so it must be AIs? Nope: Set crowd density to low and even disabled vehicles and crowds: Same behavior. In fact: Even when the game is paused in the menu-screens i get low FPS while in the city. WHAT THE FAK? It's a goddamn menu-screen! What's clogging up all the cores?

 

Maybe faulty mods? Okay, let's load a save without any mods, and see: Slightly better, but still FPS steadily dropping, and then crash to desktop with the same useless generic error in the logs.

 

Well that's weird. It behaves like a memory- or CPU-leak, yet it happens even with the vanilla game on my setup? Let's check for memleaks first: Nope, 5GB max - not even using the full 15GB i have free. Maybe it's trashing or GC is going nuts? Nope: Memstats are saying that's not the problem.

 

At this point i was almost out of ideas. And other people on forums were reporting similiar symptoms: What makes CP2077 unplayable on some systems is not GPU or RAM: The game is clearly designed for low-RAM consoles, and it's graphics can scale down even to low-end GPUs. No, the problem is CPU load: This is a game that requires a server CPU after the death of moore's law - for a faking menu screen! What the hell?

 

And then i tried the last thing anyone would think of: Lower my monitor refreshrate from 240hz to 144hz, then 120hz and finally 60hz.

 

Instant improvement! Okay, it still crashes every 40mins (as opposed to 5mins) for no reason (more on this later), but now i get double the framerate in the city, and the strange 'cpu-leak' seems to be gone.

 

But why? Why on earth would lowering my monitor refreshrate help CPU-load (and SSD-load as i found out later)? Answer: Red-engine is designed for the stoneage! An age where every screen runs at 60hz. In fact most things are hardcoded to framerate: AI, asset-streaming, and many other things. It's like those arcade-cabinet conversions, where if you try to run it at anything else than 60hz, everything goes bonkers. That's how bad red-engine is!

 

Of course if you castrate your monitor to 60hz, in exchange for the game working as designed, you're FPS will tank to 30hz the moment your hardware cannot sustain 60hz anymore in busy scenes. But that's the ugly truth: This game is designed for 60hz monitors, and will not run properly at higher refreshrates, unless maybe you're running 2 striped SSDs and a 16-core CPU.

 

But why was i still getting occassional crashes after 30-40 mins? Answer: Cyber Engine Tweaks. More specifically: The "patches"-page. My recommendation: Do not use any of those CET-patches. Disable them all, and use mods and ini-tweaks instead that provide the same functionality (like skipping intro movies).

 

So in summary: All my CPU and crashing issues went away, the moment i ran the game at 60hz fixed vsync, and disabled all "patches" in the CET-settings.

[bofhnexus]

Update: More evidence red engine is hardcoded to monitor refreshrates: If i set my monitor refreshrate to 85hz, the game crashes the moment i load any savegame. Yet 60hz, 100hz and 120hz load fine (with the later two being unstable as described in the OP). Notice the refreshrates loading properly are common ones, while the one failing (85hz) is something prolly nobody at CDPR or their internal testers ever tried.

 

My conclusion remains the same: Whoever argued that this kind of engine was suitable for a post 2020 release (likely a manager) needs to be fired. And the head engineer who in this group meeting reported that red engine could be updated for the current age also needs to be fired.

 

This being said, last time i checked not even the CEO and marketing department leaders were fired for a totally borked PR campaign, so i guess nothing will change, and nobody should trust a word coming out of CDPR.

 

This is really sad, because i loved GOG's mindset until the CP2077 debacle. By not taking any responsibility in action - neither for the PR-failure, nor for the inadequate engine and resulting performance bottlenecks (and resulting feature-cuts), all they're communicating is: Thanks for your money. We'll get this trainwreck semi-playable and then move on. Nobody will face any consequences, so expect more of the same in the future.

[chigger254]

Well, I guess the good news for your issue is that the next CDPR game will be using Unreal Engine 5, so they're going away from this engine.

Edited September 16, 2022 by chigger254