Plus: has the 2.0 upgrade delivered tech improvements to the established game?
Cyberpunk 2077has come a long way.
Sony even pulled the game from sale amidst a wave of negative feedback from early players.
It’s a major piece of post-release content, and the game’s only planned expansion.
So how does this new release - crafted free of last-gen constraints - run on the current-gen console systems?
And does the accompanying 2.0 game update bring any notable changes to Night City?
Phantom Liberty takes place in Dogtown, a dilapidated area just outside the boundaries of Night City.
It’s quite open, with broad streets dotted with huge residential towers, nightclubs, and casinos.
Some things seemed to have changed as of the latest update.
This likely indicates the use of hardware variable rate shading on those systems to conserve GPU performance.
In actual gameplay, I didn’t find that the VRS was noticeable.
In the performance mode, Cyberpunk 2077 now has an 1800p FSR 2 output resolution, down from 2160p.
In terms of performance, Dogtown does seem a touch heavier than Night City.
I noticed substantial frame-rate issues during open-world traversal on all current gen platforms in their respective performance modes.
Combat also takes occasional hits with some momentary pockets of dropped frames, though this is less intrusive.
The game can definitely still drop frames here, specifically during fast traversal.
I also noticed an extended issue in the market area where frame-rates tumbled while sprinting through it at times.
The new Dogtown content isn’t the only new thing in Cyberpunk this month.
Those are the key developments in this patch, and on the surface any technical adjustments seem pretty minor.
Most of the new changes essentially amount to minor aesthetic tweaks that seem very artist-driven.
The new patch on Xbox Series consoles doesn’t seem to run quite as consistently as the PS5 code.
