A week ago, CD Projekt Red posted the first footage we’d yet seen of Cyberpunk 2077 running on consoles, using both the Xbox One X and Xbox Series X for its demonstrations. Now, Playstation owners are getting some attention as well, with a new trailer that shows about 4 minutes of PS4 Pro footage and about 2 and a half minutes of PS5 footage. Unfortunately for those of us who are still on the PS4's launch model, there’s nothing to show off how the game runs on Sony’s base current-gen (last-gen?) machine.
Like with the Xbox footage, the video showing off Playstation gameplay maxes out at 1080p and doesn’t support 60 fps, so we’re mostly stuck to anecdotal impressions here. Also like the Xbox footage, the video here takes place early into the game and jumps around to avoid spoilers, which means it shows off a good deal of situations, though there’s a bit of a catch.
Before we get started, though, the video’s narrator reminds us that the footage we’re about to see doesn’t include all of the day-one graphics enhancements set to come as a free patch at launch, though it does have “a great number of those fixes.” She also affirms that a “full, next-gen upgrade is coming for free sometime next year,” which means that the video's Playstation 5 footage is from the game running via backwards compatibility.
That’s quite a few disclaimers, probably because of the game’s many delays and reports of crunch at the studio, but perhaps most noticeable in this video is the lack of side by side comparisons that we saw in the Xbox footage. Instead, the video starts with a sequence of PS4 Pro footage and ends with some brief PS5 footage.
That’s a bit of a shame, because it means that while the video does show off driving, combat, daytime, nighttime, clear weather and rainy weather, only some of those effects show up on certain consoles. On my watch, the character and vehicle models looked great on either console, with the major difference being the effect fidelity. There’s a small moment around 3:35 where the shadows on a dossier seem to pixelate and glitch out as a character flips through it on the PS4 Pro, and rain looks more dense on the PS5 than on the PS4 Pro.
It’s a little difficult to make direct comparisons, though, because certain effects, like rain droplets accumulating on a car window or the sun’s rays shining down in the desert, only appear on one of the consoles.
Still, if you’re planning on playing Cyberpunk 2077 on Playstation, this video might be useful to you despite being as manicured as it is. We’re going to have to wait to get our hands on official benchmarks, as well as to see how that day one patch and next-gen upgrade pan out, but for now, it seems as if you’ll be able to run the game just fine on either generation. Except, perhaps, if you own a base model PS4 or Xbox One, which we again still haven’t seen any footage from.
