So, what did you stand up to on the vacation break? I used to be meaning to spend a little bit of time catching up on my horribly late slate of tasks, however I ended up happening one more rabbit gap – and this one’s fairly intriguing. Cyberpunk 2077 on PC ships with a variety of inner benchmarks and streaming assessments, solely one in every of which customers truly get to see. Nonetheless, a number of others can be found and due to a quirk of CD Projekt RED’s cross-platform save system, it is doable to port these benchmark sequences throughout to consoles. I wasn’t precisely optimistic that they might work – however they do. The query is, are they in any manner helpful?
CDPR’s ‘official’ benchmark and a variety of others are accessible within the PC model of the sport and by my depend, 4 of them auto-save throughout their length, or else assist you to make a guide save as they begin. This makes them exceptionally simple to entry on the PC sport (you load them like every other save sport) but it surely additionally implies that they switch throughout when you log into CDPR’s on-line community.
Below this method, the final guide save, fast save and auto save transfer from system to system, and that is how I managed to ‘port’ throughout PC’s benchmark sequences throughout to consoles. Sadly, saving progress is not doable within the official benchmark accessible from the principle menu, but it surely’s arguably much less fascinating than the others anyway.
So how good are they as precise benchmarks – and to what extent do they reveal precise variations between the consoles? It ought to go with out saying that with the consoles working their RT modes, or high quality mode within the case of Xbox Collection S, all of those benchmarks mainly lock to their goal 30 frames per second, which highlights a limitation of porting a PC benchmark throughout to a console. Sometimes, a benchmark is used with an unlocked frame-rate, so elements will be pushed to their maximums. Console experiences are extra devoted to consistency and that is precisely what the RT mode delivers in these benches: a brand new body for each second refresh on a typical front room show. Within the benchmark content material no less than, they run nigh-on flawlessly.
In Cyberpunk 2077’s 60fps efficiency mode although, there are variations. In three of the 4 benchmarks, PS5, Xbox Collection X and Collection S are fairly intently matched – with simply the sense that the Collection X is not fairly as strong with its lock to 60fps. In a fourth benchmark although, the load will increase and PlayStation 5 can run at a most of 12fps to the higher in comparison with Collection X.
Beforehand, there’s been some stage of assumption that the efficiency mode could also be CPU restricted (which makes the Xbox outcome odd to elucidate – it has extra CPU sources accessible than PS5). Nonetheless, Collection S working with a lowered decision is ready to out-perform Collection X, so the GPU is the extra possible clarification. With a 60fps cap in place, commonplace benchmarking metrics aren’t particularly legitimate however consistency will be measured – our pattern of this benchmark is 15,500 frames lengthy. And the place there are duplicate frames, we’re deviating from consistency.
Fairly why there are variations between Collection X and PS5 is curious – you’d count on Xbox to be quicker, or broadly on par based mostly on the whole lot we have discovered from the consoles this technology. The standard presets chosen by CD Projekt RED for PS5 and Xbox Collection X are mainly equivalent. Nonetheless, whereas each use FSR 2 upscaling to reconstruct to 1800p, the dynamic decision ranges do differ: Xbox Collection X’s DRS vary is 1152p to 1440p, whereas PS5’s equal is 1008p to 1440p. We expect Xbox could also be utilizing variable charge shading (VRS) however whether it is, the enhance to efficiency appears minimal. The extra aggressive DRS window on PlayStation 5 appears to translate to raised efficiency – and we would argue that matching that vary on Xbox Collection X may be a great transfer for the developer.
Finishing my journey down the rabbit gap, I transferred throughout equal settings from the console model’s efficiency mode to PC (a hat tip to Mohammed Rayan for the help right here) and examined out the identical benchmarks on a pc constructed from consoles components, or shut equivalents: the AMD 4800S desktop package, constructed on the Xbox CPU, together with the RX 6700 10GB. This barely obscure AMD GPU has very related specs to the PS5 GPU – reminiscence interface and infinity cache apart. Matching frequencies to the PS5’s 2.23GHz, our console-like PC is sort of as quick as PS5 and once more, quicker than Collection X.
Handle cookie settings
Swapping in a mammoth RX 7900 XTX eradicated all efficiency points. I additionally tweaked the dynamic decision ranges on the RX 6700 runs to match each PS5 and Collection X, discovering that in each situations, the PC was quicker than Collection X for essentially the most half (however not by a lot on matching Xbox settings) whereas PS5 was just a little extra constant nonetheless. Maybe the totally different APIs or GPU compilers made a distinction, or maybe the dynamic decision components is totally different between consoles and PC (it usually is in video games that assist DRS on each methods). Even so, the conclusion does recommend that perhaps Xbox might stand to enhance from the choice of a wider DRS window.
So, forgive me for indulging myself on this one. Whereas the train is usually tutorial, the outcomes are nonetheless fascinating – we have recognized in regards to the inner assessments for a while, however there was by no means any assure that they’d function on the consoles in any respect. There may be nonetheless a divide between PC and particular person console builds, in any case. Nonetheless, they do work – albeit inside the settings confines and frame-rate limits set by the developer. And now I am questioning if there’s something related within the Phantom Liberty enlargement and even perhaps The Witcher 3. Maybe I am going to discover time to look into it throughout my subsequent Christmas break.
