December 15, 2020 There are several conflicting reports on the impact of editing the configuration file, so we searched a bit more.
Cyberpunk 2077 has had a pretty turbulent release, with many praising its gripping story and expansive open world, while others criticizing its poor performance. Even those with Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 20 series saw frame rates drop well below the 60fps average they would expect on just average settings, including yours.
As it turns out, some of these issues stem from the configuration files that reserve the same amount of memory and VRAM on the PC as they do on the console, no matter how much your system uses. Sure, CD Projekt Red’s developers probably have a hotfix inbound to put an end to the problem, but you don’t have to twirl your thumbs for long if you’re itchy to play and don’t want to suffer through a slideshow.
Rather than frantically tinkering with Cyberpunk 2077’s PC settings to get a good frame rate, ThePhoenixRoyal on the subreddit describes how to dive into the config files yourself to change the parameters, but be warned that searching through your configuration files could potentially crash your game or Windows – so proceed at your own risk.
Make sure you do not let the game start before modifying the configuration files.
The path to the Memory Pool Budgets configuration file you are looking for will be slightly different depending on the platform you bought Cyberpunk 2077 on, but it should always be within the game’s engine and config subfolders. Let’s use Steam as an example here:
Steam steamapps common Cyberpunk2077 engine config memory_pool_budgets.csv
Open the file with a text editor, such as Notepad. What you’ll notice when you first enter is that ‘PoolCPU’ has 1,536 MB reserved, which is a fraction of the 8 GB needed to meet the minimum requirements. ‘PoolGPU’ is also 3 GB across the board, making it the same as Durango and Orbis, which run the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 respectively.
Ideally you would prefer your PoolCPU to be equal to half of your total RAM capacity – if you have 16 GB then you would want to increase the figure ‘1,536 MB’ to ‘8 GB’ instead. However, the PoolGPU should be the full VRAM your graphics card can provide. Your best bet is to search for your exact model, but an example of this would be switching from the ‘3 GB’ to ‘8 GB’ if you own an RTX 2080. After entering the desired values, save the document and start your game.
This is not a comprehensive solution to the performance issues you may be experiencing, and your mileage may vary when it comes to thwarting known bugs in this way, but this method has vastly improved the experience for a few players here at PCGN.
However, after digging a little further, it looks like this is the memory reservation and not really a limitation on budgets meaning both the RAM and VRAM bandwidth is already possible exceed the numbers here – it won’t explicitly reserve the amount it wants to use until you change it. This means that those of you who tend to open browser tabs or maybe a few other applications running in the background should see a greater frame rate difference when modifying this configuration file than players who close everything before starting the game.
Further testing is required before we can say for sure whether this improves the Cyberpunk 2077 experience, but there are plenty of players who swear it works to make it worth a try.