So, what did you get up to on the holiday break? I was intending to spend a bit of time catching up on my horribly late slate of projects, but I ended up going down yet another rabbit hole – and this one’s quite intriguing. Cyberpunk 2077 on PC ships with a range of internal benchmarks and streaming tests, only one of which users actually get to see. However, several others are available and thanks to a quirk of CD Projekt RED’s cross-platform save system, it’s possible to port those benchmark sequences across to consoles. I wasn’t exactly optimistic that they would work – but they do. The question is, are they in any way useful?
CDPR’s ‘official’ benchmark and a range of others are accessible in the PC version of the game and by my count, four of them auto-save during their duration, or else allow you to make a manual save as they start. This makes them exceptionally easy to access on the PC game (you load them like any other save game) but it also means that they transfer across once you log into CDPR’s online network.
Under this system, the last manual save, quick save and auto save move from system to system, and that’s how I managed to ‘port’ across PC’s benchmark sequences across to consoles. Unfortunately, saving progress isn’t possible in the official benchmark available from the main menu, but it’s arguably less interesting than the others anyway.
So how good are they as actual benchmarks – and to what extent do they reveal actual differences between the consoles? It should go without saying that with the consoles running their RT modes, or quality mode in the case of Xbox Series S, all of these benchmarks basically lock to their target 30 frames per second, which highlights a limitation of porting a PC benchmark across to a console. Typically, a benchmark is used with an unlocked frame-rate, so components can be pushed to their maximums. Console experiences are more dedicated to consistency and that’s exactly what the RT mode delivers in these benches: a new frame for every second refresh on a typical living room display. In the benchmark content at least, they run nigh-on flawlessly.