Last week, CD Projekt Red released a hotfix for Cyberpunk 2077, improving performance on AMD’s Ryzen CPUs, among others. The official patch notes mention optimized thread utilization for quad and hex-core Ryzen processors. Interestingly, the 8, 12, and 16-core chips were left unchanged even though the same fix also worked for the higher-end parts.
[AMD SMT] Optimized default core/thread utilization for 4-core and 6-core AMD Ryzen processors. 8-core, 12-core and 16-core processors remain unchanged and behaving as intended. This change was implemented in cooperation with AMD and based on tests on both sides indicating that performance improvement occurs only on CPUs with 6 cores and less.
Tests conducted by PC Games Hardware show that the octa-core Ryzen 7 7800X3D gains an extra ~40% performance with the community fix at “720p Ultra” with ray-tracing turned on. This hotfix improves thread utilization when SMT (Simultaneous Multi-Threading) is enabled. Disabling SMT improves performance in many games as each thread gets more resources (cache, registers, etc.). However, Cyberpunk 2077 runs extremely well on Ryzen CPUs and benefits immensely from SMT.
A 0.2% (low) increase of 22 FPS is certainly a cause for concern and needs to be fixed with an official hotfix. We’re talking about the difference between smooth and stuttery gameplay here. It’s unfortunate how AMD and CDPR missed this (massive) detail this long after the official release.
