Cyberpunk 2077 Ryzen Hex Edit Tested – Boosted AMD Performance?
Power Usage and Thread Utilisation
We are not happy just reporting on how this Hex edit impacts Cyberpunk 2077’s performance; we also want to know why performance is changed. Thankfully, CapFrameX features logging tools which can be used to analyse the power consumption and thread utilisation of processor while benchmarking Cyberpunk 2077.
As expected, the power consumption and thread utilisation of our quad-core non-SMT results remain unchanged. However, our quad-core with SMT (8-threads) results see an increase of thread utilisation from 54% to 91% and a power consumption increase or 5 watts. These changes yield a 25% boost to Cyberpunk 2077’s average framerates in our testing, which is a huge performance leap for a 5W power consumption bump.
In our 6-core tests, our Cyberpunk 2077 Hex edit resulted in a 3-watt reduction in power consumption and an increase in thread utilisation from 47% to 82%. This change resulted in a 10.5% increase in Cyberpunk 2077’s average framerate.
With our 12-core and 16-core results, thread utilisation is increased, and Cyberpunk 2077’s game performance had dropped. In short, this Hex edit makes Cyberpunk 2077 less efficient on high core count Ryzen processors, both in terms of performance per watt and in terms of raw performance. Don’t try this Hex edit with a Ryzen 9 series processor.
Conclusion
Cyberpunk 2077 has some clear room for additional optimisation, especially for users of Ryzen series processors. While this Hex edit is not perfect, it does deliver tangible performance increased for users of Ryzen processors with SMT enabled and 8 or fewer CPU cores.
If you are not comfortable with editing your executables, CD Projekt Red will likely deliver their own CPU optimisations with future game patches. That said, it is unknown when an official Ryzen patch for Cyberpunk 2077 will be released.
For additional information and optimisation tips for Cyberpunk 2077’s PC version, please read our PC performance review for the game here.
You can join the discussion on Cyberpunk 2077’s Ryzen Hex edit on the OC3D Forums.
