FPS cut in half after first crash.

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I just had something weird occur. So last weekend I completely reinstalled my PC. I was having issues all over the place and the system was kind of a trash heap based off an 7 or 8 year old Windows 7 install that I upgraded to WIndows 10 without ever doing a proper disk format and reinstall. Went through three graphics crad and two CPUs / Mainboards counting my current setup.

Anyways I didn't play Cyberpunk since the 1.23 update so in a good while.

After the fresh install I decided to look if I found some improvements in Cyberpunk. After dialing settings back in I loaded an old save file located in front of the Mega Building with V's appartment usually a place where the game performed it's worst with me.

The FPS were boosted about 10 to 20 on avereage (putting me steadily back into the 60 to 80 range instead of the 45 to 65 range in that place so I was quite happy already.

First strange thing:
I started a new safe game later that day. Only to find that I now was running at 110 to 140 FPS. I thought well maybe since I used the nomad origin it is attributed to being in the badlands which usually performs the best.
But well I played all the way to the first vsit to Vik to get the Kiroshi without frames dropping below 100. I never had that good FPS with Cyberpunk since switching to my 1440P display.

Second Strange Thing (VERY STRANGE):
So I am at Vik's I get through the Scene and upon leaving I talk to him. The Game freezes completely so I had to force kill it. In this scene I was running at 120 to 144 FPS.

So after the game crashed I booted the game back up, loaded the autosafe made right before the crash after getting out of the chair and I kid you not my FPS is cut in half 60 to 72 FPS. Same place, same character. Nothing changed at all between the two startups of the game.

What gives? It almost feels like the game crashing actually corrupted something in the game files or on my PC to the point of the games performing tanking substantially.

Did anyone notice similar things? Anyone got any clue how to get the game back to perofrming nicely?

Next thing I will try tomorrow is actually completely wiping the game from the PC and reinstalling it.
 
Did you also test that with older save games (maybe 20-30 Minutes before the crash)?
 
Ok so next strange thing.

I did a shutdown and restart of my PC to no avail. Hopped into New World to play with a friend but that did not pan out as he got off work late and did not actually want to play.

So I stop New World and hop back into Cyberpunk only to find that now FPS are back to normal. Almost as iff the GPU was clogged up and needed to get the pipes blown through,
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Yep could be a good idea, at least for the freeze who is not "normal" at all :(

The Game freezing on me has been a constant thing from the start. No other game does it or has problems. I even changed hardware completely since getting the game but the freezing issues persisted. The frequency of crashes changed from patch to patch but I never got rid of them completely. I am like 99% sure that there is still plenty afoot with the game and it's engine. Problem is crashes and freezes have always been random for me. No special spot in the game where it freezes up. It used to be that it was more likely to freeze and crash when I wnet into hacking mode. It also seemd for a while taht for me the crashing had to do with sound playback.

The freezes I am getting currently though clearly are failures of rendering, as the sound keeps playing back perfectly. Almost as if the game basically stil runs but the rendering just stops. I even let it run to see if teh crash handler would kick in before killing the process.

Did you also test that with older save games (maybe 20-30 Minutes before the crash)?

I did in fact not since I have no such safe game. on that character and my safegames from before patch 1.3 are all performing bad. Which also to me seems like there is bad juju transfered through the safegames themselves.

I bet the poor engine and game sysetm programmers are on the brink of going insane tyring to catch all those bugs on a live build without the posibilty to just do stuff from scratch again.
 
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Ok weird, but it seem to be strange that come to the "game itself" since many players manage to play without any crash/freeze (it's not the same for bugs) :(
So you can report it to CDPR if you want and if it's not already done (with a DxDiag, it's better), they can help ;)
 
I have experienced this problem multiple times on 2 different hardware configs (an i7 6700k + GTX 1070 and a 5900x + RTX 3060ti).

This relates to a very specific issue and the solution for how to fix it, which I will describe below. It has recurred on the same hardware at least once and I have yet to isolate the cause.

Here is a video of what the freezing looks like:


This video was recorded after removing all mods and custom user files (.ini and .xml keybinding stuff etc). I had to do this to eliminate the possibility that it was caused by one of my crappy mods. Thats also why my character has no clothes on and only 1 weapon equipped to reproduce the problem.

Description of the problem:

When I draw a weapon, my framerate is halved. If I holster the weapon again, my framerate will gradually climb back to normal. Unholster and it gets cut in half again. Shadowplay doesn't record overlays so you can't see the fps counter but you can see how choppy it gets with a katana drawn. If I look down at the ground with a weapon drawn, the game will freeze. If I don't look up fast enough, the game will not recover and after 2 minutes, REDEngine will watchdog timeout.

The solution:

1. Delete nvidia shader cache. You can do this by first turning off the nvidia shader cache in nvidia control panel, deleting the highlighted subfolders in \%localappdata%\NVIDIA\ and then rebooting. Re-enable the shader cache via nvidia control panel.

1633719096860.png


2. Delete all the files in the REDengine cache, then verify/repair your game installation via GOG launcher. Make a backup of any user modified files you have before doing this (such as userinputmappings.xml and inputcontexts.xml if you have custom keybindings for instance). User modified files will be identified as dissimilar to stock and they will be overwritten. You can find the REDEngine cache at \%localappdata%\REDEngine\

1633719190309.png


If this doesn't work, then do the nuclear option and proceed to step 3:

3. Backup all your savegames, which can be found at \Users\Yourusername\Saved Games\CD Projekt Red\.

Backup all your mods (if you have any) and user modified files. These are mostly found in:

\Cyberpunk 2077\archive\pc\mod\
\Cyberpunk 2077\bin\x64\plugins\cyber_engine_tweaks\mods\
\Cyberpunk 2077\r6\scripts\
\Cyberpunk 2077\r6\scripts\config\ (custom keybindings)
\Cyberpunk 2077\engine\config\platform\pc\ (custom .ini files)

Now uninstall the game and redownload it.

Go into the game and check your framerate (but it should be fine). Then restore all your backup folders so you can play with the game with your saves, mods, custom stuff etc.
 
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Here is a video of what the freezing looks like:
That video looks quite similar to how the freezing looks for me. As I said teh sound plays on perfectly, but the renderer will freeze up. I did not notice framedrops on weapons drawn though.

I will try deleting the cashes to see if that repairs the freezing.

Question: Do I reenable the shader cashing in the NVidia Control Panel after eveyrthing is done or just keep it off?
 
Re-enable it. Theres no reason I can think of to permanently disable it. Only temporarily if it prevents you from clearing the shader cache when you need to.

After re-installing 4 days ago, this issue is now happening to me again. OP, are you using reshade by any chance?
 
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Re-enable it. Theres no reason I can think of to permanently disable it. Only temporarily if it prevents you from clearing the shader cache when you need to.

After re-installing 4 days ago, this issue is now happening to me again. OP, are you using reshade by any chance?
Nope I don't use any kind of mod. It's a fresh vanilla install.
 
Do you have a video showing it? Is the freezing and/or fps drop correlated to whats in camera view? As in, can you trigger it reliably based on something in camera view? My current theory is reshade shaders like MXAO. I'm still studying how it works.

I normally don't use anything in Reshade other than colour correction in realtime. I do use DoF, MXAO and RealLongExposure for taking photos but in some cases, I forget to turn MXAO off and its easy to play without realising its on. DoF and long exposure are effects that are very obviously on with a moving scene.
 
Question: Do I reenable the shader cashing in the NVidia Control Panel after eveyrthing is done or just keep it off?
This is something you mostly want to leave on default -- especially for a game that will be constantly streaming assets, like open world games.

Shader caching will ensure that the game builds a package for your particular GPU / driver version. Disabling this means the game is going to need to decompress shaders in real-time gameplay. This will destroy your FPS while new shaders are loading (which will be pretty constant for a long while). Once all necessary shaders are loaded, performance will improve again.

It's not a setting I'd recommend people change from defaults unless they are trying to do something specific with a particular game, and they're actively aware of why disabling the shader cache would help.
 
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