Fans criticise Cyberpunk 2077’s performance on base PS4 and Xbox One consoles

Cyberpunk 2077 players have criticised the game’s performance on base PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles.

CD Projekt’s much-anticipated open-world game released on consoles and PC today, offering the first chance to date to see how retail code performs on the seven-year-old PS4 and Xbox One.

As with the PC version, the game appears to suffer from a significant number of visual bugs at launch, but video evidence suggests these issues can be far more severe on the older console hardware.

Social media videos show the PS4 and Xbox One versions of Cyberpunk 2077 taking a significant amount of time to load environments and characters, resulting in some scenes that look out of place in a final retail game.

According to initial analysis by Digital Foundry, the PS4 version of Cyberpunk appears to run between 720p and 900p resolution, while the framerate drops to as low as 20fps when driving around big city areas. Some indoor environments run well at 30fps, but can drop to 25, it said.

Running the game on PlayStation 5 via backwards compatibility increases framerates to 60fps, as detailed in VGC’s earlier Cyberpunk PS5 vs. PC analysis.

Full next-gen versions of Cyberpunk 2077 aren’t due out until next year, but the game’s developer has said the last-gen console releases will run better on the newest systems.

However, analysis of both Xbox One and PS4 versions running via backwards compatibility suggests that only Xbox Series X offers the option to choose between a higher resolution or smoother framerate on day one.

Cyberpunk’s seeming lack of PS5 graphics options could be due to an issue with the way the console handles backwards compatibility.

Enabling next-gen performance features such as 120fps reportedly requires a full native port on PS5, while Microsoft allows such features to be added via a backwards compatibility patch.

Recently, a number of games including Star Wars: Squadrons, Call of Duty: Warzone and Rocket League have received performance updates for those playing on Xbox Series X, but not PS5.

In VGC’s Cyberpunk 2077 review, which was based on our time with the PC version of the game, our critic called it “a stunning achievement, if you can overlook the glitches”.

The game currently has a 91 Metascore on review aggregation site Metacritic, based on 50 PC reviews.