Night City 2025

Budget Battle Station

I'll be doing a separate blog post detailing my (mis) adventures in building a budget gaming rig in 2025, but for now and for context, I just want to lay down some detail around my build components. My PC is solidly in the budget territory of Cheapskatery, which is near the province of Skinflintville. As I said, I'll detail my build experience in greater detail in a stand-alone blog post. So, for now, I'll just outline my components:

  • CPU: Ryzen 7 5700X CPU
  • Motherboard: Asus Prime 550 Plus
  • PSU: Corsair RM750e
  • RAM: 32gb Corsair Vengeance Pro DDR4 3600
  • Case: Corsair 3500 series ATX
  • AIO: Cooler Master 360L
  • GPU: Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3060 12gb
  • SSD: Crucial Gen4 2TB NVMe
  • Display: 34" KTC 21:9 1440p Ultrawide 2k display

Cyberpunk looks like Cyberjunk

For the uninitiated, I will just put it simply. The above components are nothing to write home about. Nearly every component is, at best, a generation behind. As such, I anticipated that some, if not most, gaming experiences would be...challenging.

Generally speaking budget PC's can range from $500-$1500, mid-range builds can run from $1500-$4000, and high end rigs just get crazier from there.

Interestingly, the Dead Space remake runs near flawlessly on this budget build, hitting 80fps (99% GPU 45% CPU) with most settings pegged at ultra. Meanwhile, Cyberpunk, when first booted using NVIDIA's optimization settings, would struggle to hit 35fps (92% GPU 35% CPU). But this is why we build PC's right? Let the tuning begin! My process around tuning a game has always been pretty simple, and likely, wildly inefficient. I literally just drop every setting to its lowest possible value. Once I've dropped all graphical settings to their lowest possible value, I'll jump back into the game and see what kind of frames I'm getting. In the case of Cyberpunk, I was hitting 160fps. "OK" I thought. This is good. Now I know what the high range of my frames is. At this point, I begin to toggle the settings back into Medium territory, and despite having a card capable of Ray Tracing, I don't go anywhere near that just yet. Now, I want to be clear here, I know that I can't expect too much out of my budget build. I know my rig is going to be pretty limited. That being said, I was still a little surprised at how only marginally better looking the game would get as I increased settings from potato to medium, and medium to high. My frames began to crater into the 40's, while the game continued to look like a green, hazy, bloom filled mess. I decided to flip on DLSS and threw it into "Ultra Performance" mode.

DLSS stands for Deep Learning Super Sampling and is NVIDIA's AI technology that tries to achieve higher quality graphics while putting an emphasis on performance. In other words, it can help lower tier cards achieve better graphical fidelity.

Using this setting profile, my FPS finally jumped above 50 (average was around 55fps) and the graphics were...ok? Yeah...like, just ok. I'm not going to pull any punches here. I was pretty disappointed. I have seen the subreddits and other players photo mode captures. I know this game can be GORGEOUS. But so far, for me, it looks just meh. And more than just the green, hazy, meh-fest; I was now experiencing a wildly distracting and nausea inducing flicker that was near constant in most of the game's environments. This steady heartbeat-like flickering was particularly abhorrent in V's apartment complex. A quick google of "Cyberpunk Flicker" will net you thousands of results. "Here we go" I thought to myself whilst I literally groaned audibly.

An advantage to console gaming over PC can be the reduced complexity of just playing a game. Its likely that a console game will just work within the hardware and software confines of the console's ecosphere. While you may change a few settings here or there, these will likely just involve quality of life changes to controls or small tweaks to basic appearance options.

After reading various posts, articles, blogs, and reddit posts about the flickering issues - I land, generally, on the fact that DLSS is the likely culprit. And sure enough, disabling DLSS drastically reduces the flickering...while also then cratering my FPS again. So, while I'm no longer feeling like a drunken sailor staring at my PC monitor, I'm now solidly back into 30fps territory. And while 30fps is certainly playable, it's nowhere near ideal. I'm starting to recall how much patience PC gaming can require at times...

r/pcmasterrace

As a lifelong gamer, there are several truths that most of us hold to be self-evident.

  • Mouse Keyboard Combo is superior to controller in all conceivable instances.
  • Building your own battle station is markedly more satisfying than simply buying a pre-built console or PC.
  • If the base game and settings aren't enough. Mods baby. Mods.

At this point, I'm maxing out at 30fps and the game is a mess of bloom artifacts and looks to have a green colored fruit roll-up stuck over the top of it. Now, again, some of this is absolutely because the rig I'm trying to run this on cost me less than 800 bones. However, I cannot accept that this the best my little budget battle station can do. And so, back to the interwebs I go.

First person view of Judy standing in front of Night City skyline

I spent some time looking for articles and subreddits that specifically called out mods that addressed the green haze and subtle flickering issues I was experiencing. The vast majority posts I came across called out two specific mods. Disable TAA and Bloom and Mango's Ultra Reshade

For the uninitiated - Nexus Mods hosts over 650,000 mods for over 3000 games, developed by nearly 150,000 different authors. It's a tremendous community for PC mods.

I also came across a few posts that mentioned that FSR3 offered a far superior experience to DLSS in Cyberpunk, even across NVIDIA cards. So, first, I went into my graphics setting and enabled FSR3, and I chose "Performance" mode. Then, I briefly exited the game and installed ReShade. ReShade is an advanced post-processing tool that is FAR too complex for me to fully explain here. If you're unfamiliar, I'd just suggest you search out some youtube vids on what ReShade is, and how to best employ it across your game library. It offers an absolute wealth of possibilities. You can check out ReShade here. The Official ReShade Site Once I had ReShade installed, I also installed Mango's V2 preset, and dropped the disable bloom ini into the Cyberpunk config folder. I booted up the game and held my breath. I have to be honest. At this point, I wasn't expecting much. I supposed I had just reserved myself to probably being disappointed. After all, many of the posts I had read indicated that on older machines, the game just did't or couldn't run well. To my amazement, when I loaded my game (last saved in V's apartment) the graphical quality was unbelievable! The game looked crisp and clean. The green haze that had previously covered everything was gone! The horribly distracting and nauseating heartbeat flicker was gone, and both character models as well as environmental textures were absolutely stunning. And the best part. My FPS overlay read a steady 70 frames, even in densely populated areas.

A futuristic automotive garage doing repairs on a car

With the bloom disabled, I could finally see crisp and realistic textures in all the diverse lighting scenarios the game offers. Many scenes in the game are just jaw dropping, especially considering you're running through them in real time, actual game play graphics. A quick check across my graphics settings and nearly everything is set to High or better. Admittedly, I'm leaving Ray Tracing off. Is it cool to see accurate and clear reflections in puddles? Yes. Yes it is. Can I live with subtle blurry reflections instead, for a buff of 10-15fps? Also yes. I'm willing to make a few calculated sacrifices in order to hit that sweet spot of 70-80fps. It's worth noting that's 70-80fps in 1440p. I do get occasional drops into the 60's during particularly chaotic moments, but it's not super noticeable to me. And this is the moment. As I run around Night City, beautiful neon lighting casting deep pinks and purples over bustling crowds and poorly parked cars. It's this moment that drives home that all the time spent researching and tuning were so worth it. PC gaming can be frustrating and tedious, but it's moments like these that make you really appreciate how much control you really have over your PC gaming experience if you decide to take it. I have to believe that every PC gamer is, to some degree, a problem solver at heart. You have to be. And there is no feeling quite so satisfying as the feeling of a problem solved.

A funeral scene in a futuristic church from the game Cyberpunk 2077

The very bad, no good, rotten Heist

If you know you know. If you don't. I'm about to tell you. It's 2025 as I write this. Cyberpunk 2077 was released over 4 years ago. No spoilers here, but very early on in the game, there's a mission called "The Heist". And friends. The Heist - is a bug ridden mess. I don't have any screen captures for you. Mostly because during this mission, I was incapable of rational thought. Again, no spoilers, so I won't go into exquisite detail, but allow me some generalities. Early in the mission you'll enter a building. Upon moving beyond a certain point in said building, the lighting will suddenly shift to ALL RED. Now, don't get me wrong - this looks kinda cool. However, it's completely ridiculous, and indicative of a larger issue that you don't even realize is heading your way.

Upon it's release in December 2020, Cyberpunk 2077 was lamented as being a bug ridden mess. Particularly if you were unfortunate enough to have tried the game on an Xbox One or Playstation 4. The game was nigh unplayable.

It's worth noting Cyberpunk is well into it's 2.0 release cycle. In fact, as of writing, I'm playing on version 2.2. Eventually the red lighting clears up and goes back to normal as you approach some elevators. But again, it's indicative of a larger bug that's about to ruin your day. As you progress the mission a little farther, you'll eventually hit a point where you're scrambling to escape a bad situation. And then it happens. The entire screen, aside from a few onscreen indicators, goes ENTIRELY black. Yep. That's right. Total blackout at the worst possible time. If you're like me, you'll assume a glitch, and you'll reload your last autosave, which was just moments before the black screen struck. You'll load the game...and...BAM...black screen again. No exaggeration here - I literally put my head in my hands. I exited the game and, you guessed it, began to research what I was seeing. Turns out. Yep. It's a bug. And it's still plaguing players in 2025. There are many suggestions on what players did to address this. For some players, dropping all settings to low worked. For others, turning off the ambient occlusion setting worked. For me? Well, for me, none of that worked. Because of course it didn't. In the end, a combination of settings turned out to be the magic brew for me. So should you find yourself unable to restore your screen - try giving this a go.

  • drop all graphic settings to low or off
  • in display settings lock your frames per second to 30

I am fairly certain that the frame lock is really what did it for me, but I was unwilling to try and play with turning my settings back up until I cleared this god forsaken mission. After clearing, what really should have been a very cool mission, on full blown potato chunky soup settings - I was able to reset everything and return to normal. It's astonishing to me that such a game breaking bug is still present in the game. This bug is likely a deal breaker for many gamers. The Heist is an early mission, like within the first couple hours early. And I have no doubt that players literally just walk away and don't come back after the black screen of death on this mission. I know the game is in FAR better shape now than it was upon initial release, but a bug of this magnitude just living in the 2.x releases, is downright scary.

Night City always wins

I'll finish this up by saying that I'm really enjoying the game. And with all the aforementioned tweaks, it's an absolutely stunning game to look at. Night City feels alive and I am reveling in both the linear story elements, as well as the more amorphous freedom of just exploring the vast expanses the city has to offer. The character stat building is fun and I've approached situations with both overt violence and cunning stealth. I find the stealth aspects of the game to be very satisfying. Hacking security terminals and jacking camera feeds to ping enemies and scan for environmental advantages is wildly fun and engaging. I'll never tire of hacking a flood light to distract an enemy, bringing them closer to a gas canister that I've already rigged to explode. It's 🤌🏻. I've only just cracked the surface of the game thus far, and I expect I'll run into more frustrations, but I also expect that I'll have more good times than bad. It's not a perfect game, it never was, and likely never will be. But as we navigate into 2025, if you've not been, I heartily recommend you plan a visit to Night City. You might find its harder to leave than you thought.