CD Project Red this week released Patch 1.5 for Cyberpunk 2077, which enables advanced visual effects on the latest game consoles — and also includes a few enhancements for PCs. In a rather unprecedented move, the game developer also offers owners of the latest consoles the opportunity to try its game for free before buying, for five hours.
The key improvements of Cyberpunk 2077 with patch version 1.5 are enhanced visuals. On PCs, you can now get ray traced local shadows (i.e., from lights as opposed to the sun), along with improved antialiasing. On the latest-generation game consoles (PS5, XBX), the developer promises a stable framerate of 60 fps at 4K, with framerate-dependent resolution scaling, but that's without ray tracing. If you want the RT effects and other eye candy, you can get a stable 30 fps.
Other improvements include new weapons, a rebalanced economy, improved crowd reactions, new character customization options, new interactions for relations, new NPC behaviors, an updated map, UI improvements, some free content, various gameplay changes, and multiple fixes. All of these upgrades are also available in the PC version.
When CD Project Red released its highly anticipated Cyberpunk 2077 game in late 2020, it was touted as a next-generation title for next-generation platforms. While it looked very good on the latest PC hardware (and looked much better with various third-party mods installed), it did not exactly take advantage of the latest PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S consoles. The company promised to issue a patch that would bring the game's image quality up to par with the capabilities of the latest consoles, and with the release of the patch 1.5 it has finally fulfilled its promise.
The interesting part about the new patch is its size. The PC patch is 47.12 GB, which is about 75% of the game's previous install size. The Xbox Series X patch meanwhile is 62.9 GB, significantly more than the size of the original game.
Our recent graphics card reviews, like the RTX 3050 and RX 6500 XT, have used Cyberpunk 2077 as one of the ray tracing benchmarks. In our limited testing, it looks like performance has dropped slightly (~10%) when compared to the previous 1.31 version of the game. That's to be expected, with the addition of local ray traced shadows. The update also adds a built-in benchmark for PCs, which uses a different test sequence and appears to perform within a few percent of our manual benchmark, so the above chart should be relatively close to what you can experience with the 1.5 patch.
