Cyberpunk 2077 Runs Worse on Select AMD Ryzen CPUs Due to Threading Issue, But Here’s a Quick Fix

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Image: CD PROJEKT RED

PC gamers who are playing Cyberpunk 2077 on AMD rigs have discovered that the game fails to take full potential of higher-core Ryzen processors due to some sort of bug or oversight related to simultaneous multithreading (SMT). Instead of taking advantage of all logical cores, the game only sees physical cores, which means that half of the CPU’s threads go to waste (e.g., Cyberpunk 2077 only utilizes six of the Ryzen 5 5600X’s 12 total threads).

The discrepancy and idle behavior can be confirmed via Task Manager (Performance > CPU > Logical Processors Graph), but luckily, a user by the name of UnhingedDoork has uncovered a workaround that improves thread usage in Cyberpunk 2077 for AMD processors. All you need to do is change a hex value within the game’s executable file.

  1. Download a hex editor, such as HxD.
  2. Locate the Cyberpunk 2077 executable (for Steam, the directory is C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Cyberpunk 2077\bin\x64) and make a copy just to be safe.
  3. Use the editor’s find function and locate the following hex value: 75 30 33 C9 B8 01 00 00 00 0F A2 8B C8 C1 F9 08.
  4. Change the first character (75) to EB.
  5. Save your changes.

What this reportedly does is trick Cyberpunk 2077 into thinking it’s running on an Intel processor, whose Hyper-Threading Technology is utilized without issue. Unfortunately, CD PROJEKT RED hasn’t acknowledged the SMT problem with AMD CPUs yet, so it’s unclear when an official fix might be coming.

r/Amd’s BramblexD notes that the performance improvement may only be seen in AMD CPUs with eight or less cores. “For 2 CCX CPUs (with = 12 cores), switching to the Intel patch may incur a performance overhead and actually give you worse performance than before,” the user wrote.

Tsing Mui
News poster at The FPS Review.

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