Cyberpunk 2077 CPU Scaling, What Processors Work Best?

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Stacking up the chips

Cyberpunk 2077 is the most hotly-anticipated game in recent history, but it has proven to be punishing for even the most well-equipped PCs. We set out to test the new game with a wide range of the best CPUs on the market to determine which processors provide the best performance in a wide range of resolutions.

We've tested AMD's Ryzen 9, 7, 5, and 3 processors across several generations, along with Intel's Core i9, i7, i5, and i3 processors as well.

This article focuses entirely on CPU performance: If you're looking for a closer look at how the game performs with a range of different GPUs, be sure to check out our in-depth Cyberpunk 2077 performance analysis. Thus far, our CPU testing has been with the current 1.04 patch, bringing minor performance enhancements over the original game code. However, CD Projekt Red has announced that it plans to release a new 1.05 patch for PCs soon (consoles already have the patch) with some performance enhancements, but the impact of those changes remains to be seen.

We'll update our testing after the new patch, but except for select AMD models' performance, we don't expect huge changes to the CPU benchmark hierarchy we've created below. We could see slight increases in each processor's overall performance, but we expect that the performance deltas between the chips, and the rankings, will remain similar. Besides, we've already applied the 'fix' for Ryzen processors. 

Cyberpunk 2077 has certainly earned a reputation for buggy performance, and one of the most surprising errata revolves around how the game code identifies AMD's Ryzen processors. Resourceful redditors have discovered that the game code significantly harms performance on some AMD processors because it apparently checks to see if your CPU uses Team Red's 2011-era Bulldozer platform and, if not, disables multi-threading.

The enthusiast community discovered an easy-to-apply patch, which you can learn about here, that corrects the issue on select AMD models. CD Projekt Red says that it will also include similar code in the upcoming 1.05 patch. However, the game developer says the patch will only address Ryzen models with six or fewer cores, and that eight, 12, and 16 core models are unaffected. Our testing says otherwise — we continue to see performance gains with eight-core Ryzen 3000 and 5000 series processors with the fix applied, so we'll have to see how the upcoming patch addresses the eight-core models. The remainder of the pending changes listed for the 1.05 patch don't appear to have massive implications for the game engine.

In either case, we've included testing both with and without the patch applied for the Ryzen 3000 (Zen 2) and 5000 (Zen 3) series processors with eight or fewer cores, but we found that the patch does little to improve performance with the Ryzen 1000 (Zen) and Ryzen 2000 (Zen+) models. For the older Ryzen models, we've found that the change introduces buggy behavior or performance regressions, so we've excluded those extra tests.

With the preamble out of the way, let's see how the Cyberpunk 2077 CPU performance hierarchy stacks up.

Cyberpunk 2077 CPU Benchmarks Setup

We tested with the highest number of NPC's available and followed the same benchmark methodology used for our Cyberpunk 2077 PC Benchmarks, Settings, and Performance Analysis article.

We begin our test sequence at the entrance to V's apartment building and walk a path down the stairs, across the street to the left, hang a right at the vending machine, then head across the street towards the two policemen on the other side. From there, we proceed to the right across the pavilion, down another set of stairs, and to the building on the far side. We walk this same path a minimum of three times (manually) for each and every data point you see below, provided we don't get hit by a car in the game, or get distracted by Twitter and miss our queue, both of which require extra benchmark runs. Suffice it to say, I've walked this same path in Cyberpunk 2077 so many times that I'm seeing the benchmark sequence in my dreams. 

Be aware that performance can, and will, vary in other scenes and locations (up to a 20% performance range), but this scene gives us a good-enough sense of the type of performance you'll see with the various CPUs.

Our test systems easily outweigh the recommended minimum system requirements for Cyberpunk 2077. We outfitted our test systems with the Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3090 Eagle to reduce the GPU bottleneck as much as possible. Be aware that you'll see a smaller performance delta with lesser graphics cards. If you're already shackled by a GPU bottleneck, you might not see appreciable gains with the same processors we've tested below.

We strove to remove memory as a potential bottleneck, too, so we equipped our tests system with 32GB of DDR4 memory spread across two dual-rank DIMMs.

We assigned the memory to operate at each respective processor's stock specifications, but be aware that additional memory tuning/overclocking could yield higher performance results. Likewise, single-rank memory kits could also result in less performance. As we noted in our recent look at how Cyberpunk 2077 runs with varying memory kits, you can definitely run the game with 8GB of memory, and 16GB should be sufficient, but using two dual-rank DIMMs (or four single-rank DIMMs) can improve performance. If you're not running a top-end GPU, memory capacity probably won't matter much.

You can see a further breakdown of our test system at the end of the article.

Cyberpunk 2077 CPU Scaling RT Ultra Settings Benchmarks

We included the highest-end models of the 1000, 2000, 3000, and 5000 series Ryzen processors. We've also included the Core i9, i7, i5, and i3 models from Intel's 9th- and 10th-generation processors. We'll add testing with HEDT models after we assess performance impacts from the upcoming 1.05 patch.
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