It’s been six months since the release of Cyberpunk 2077’s 1.5 update – the milestone patch that finally added native support for current generation consoles. CD Projekt RED has not been idle though, the new 1.6 ‘Edgerunners’ update arrived last week, tying in with the new anime. A raft of new content features are added, but the focus of this piece is on a brand-new Xbox Series S performance mode, along with optimisations to the 30fps ray tracing mode on PS5 and Series X, where long-standing complaints about high input lag are finally addressed. Going into this one, we had two separate objectives – to put Series S’s new 60 frames per second mode through its paces and also to quantify the latency improvements on the more powerful consoles.
Until the arrival of the new patch, Series S only ran at a capped 30fps at a dynamic 1440p resolution, going down to 2304×1296 lowest via dynamic scaling. There was no mode toggle like on PS5 or Series X – no option to choose between quality and performance. Adding to the disappointment, Series S had no option for ray-traced shadows either. Patch 1.6 doesn’t add the RT features, but at least the option to switch between fidelity and frame-rate is there.
Quality mode on Series S today works pretty much just as it did before the patch, in its default mode: it runs the gamut from 1440p down to around 1296p, with a reasonably tight 30fps lock with consistent frame-pacing. The new performance mode – inevitably – degrades some settings. In terms of pixel metrics, we’re looking at a range of 1080p at peak, going down to 800p lowest, most obvious in the areas where the game can’t stick to its 60fps target. As ever, CDPR’s engine also uses a form of TAA and reconstruction to produce a final 1080p resolve.
Ultimately, it looks softer than the 1440p quality mode but it still holds up, with the increase to fluidity an obvious win. The biggest blemish to the presentation comes from fine sub-pixel elements, like wire fences, for example. The TAA upscaling doesn’t have enough data to work with, resulting in a shimmering mesh – most notable on the outback area. Within the city though, this is less of an issue.