Monthly Archives: December 2020

Cyberpunk 2077: Is it playable with a four-year old graphics card?

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Let’s get this out in the open from the start: This is not a review of Cyberpunk 2077 or commentary on its current state on last-generation consoles. The internet has plenty of discussion on the console versions for you to digest.

I have, however, started playing it on PlayStation 5 (the PS4 version). I’ve played a handful of hours but have decided to park it until the PS5 upgrade is available. I don’t want to refund the game as it was – as I may have said before – a gift from my children for Father’s Day – last year so I’ll stick with it.

A common theme, however, that seems to crop up is that Cyberpunk 2077 is a much better experience on PC. I reckon it is so I was keen to see how it ran on what it probably considered a mid-range PC these days because, let’s face it, not everyone can afford a high-end Intel or AMD CPU paired with an eye-wateringly expensive RTX3090 graphics card. I know I certainly can’t [I’d love to have a better GPU but can’t afford it right now. If there are any GPU manufacturers keen to hit me up you can email me at gamejunkienz@gmail.com…]

So I approached the Australian PR team for NamcoBandai to see if they would provide a PC code so I could testing the PC version on my rig: And kudos to the team, they sent me a code, redeemable through GOG.com.

For Cyberpunk 2077, developer CD Projekt Red recommends a minimum i5 3560K or Ryzen FX8310, 8Gb RAM and a nVidia GTX780 or AMD470. Recommended specifications are an Intel i7 4790 or an AMD Ryzen 3 3200G and a GTX1060 6Gb or a Radeon R9 Fury graphics card.

My PC is pretty mid-range these days, I reckon: An i5 8400, 16Gb PNY RGB RAM & a Sapphire RX580 8Gb, which is something like a four year old graphics card but its no slouch when it comes to performance. I’m playing at a resolution of 1080p on a 27-inch 144Hz LG monitor.

What I wanted to test was was simple enough: I wanted to see if I could I run Cyberpunk 2077, a game that was clearly developed for PC first and console second, on my mid-range (probably low-end to some PC owners) PC rather than a super computer which is what many reviewers seemed to play it on.

Using the optimised settings by Alex Battaglia from Digital Foundry & tweaks by YouTube channel RX580, I set about adjusting settings until I got what seemed to the ideal marriage between performance and visuals.

As you’d expect for a PC game, it has a  plethora of tweakable settings such as being able to adjust the number of pedestrians on screen, contact shadows, improved facial lighting geometry, volumetric clouds and fog and screen space reflections. I also switched on AMD’s Fidelity CAS [Contrast Adaptive Sharpening) which sharpens and optimally scales an image to see what impact that had on frame rate (it seemed to gain me a few frames). I also lowered volumetric fog to medium and Screen Space Reflections to medium. Obviously, I’m not using any ray tracing as it isn’t supported by the RX580.

I played the same story line I did on console – Nomad V – and frankly, the difference visually between PC and console is stark: Cyberpunk is without a doubt a much more visually stunning game on PC than it is on console, even without ray tracing. This is partly the reason I want to keep my console version: I want to see what the PlayStation 5 is capable of when the eventual upgrade lands and that ray tracing is shown off.

Using AMD’s in-built Radeon monitoring software, I found that Cyberpunk 2077 pushes the RX580 to its limits, with GPU utilisation sitting at 100% a lot of the time. Remarkably, the hottest the card seemed to get was around 74 degrees but the fans were definitely working overtime, sounding like a jumbo jet taking off a lot of the time.

My RX580 has a VRAM clock of 4210MHz and a memory clock of 2000MHz. Cyberpunk 2077 seems to be more GPU heavy than CPU heavy [CPU utilisation fluctuated from between 40% to 85%.] A one point I was using 8.2Gb of RAM (the card only has 8Gb on board).

But what about the all important frame rates? In-game it ranged between 36 frames per second right up to 48 frames per seconds. Occasionally, it even crept above 50 frames per second. I had it capped at 60FPS but I never got realistically close to that.

It did drop to 36FPS during the opening garage sequence in the nomad story line, strangely, but then rose back up to early 40s when arriving in Night City. In the van shoot out sequence early in the game, the frame rate dropped below 30 frames per second but that seem to be a common hiccup point for most players.

For the most part, though, the game averaged around 38-40 frames per second, which I’m really, really happy with, given the GPU I have. I noticed the frame rate often dropped to the mid-30s during heavy combat sequences, which is still certainly playable.

I haven’t experienced any crashes but I have had bugs and glitches. I had a weird audio one that made all the voices crackly, forcing a restart to sort it. A couple of times V’s scanner remained on screen even when I had deactivated it. Jackie, V’s friend, walked through an elevator door once and I had a classic bad-guy-caught-in-a-loop-in-an-elevator bug during a firefight. I just lobbed a grenade in: That sorted him out.

I’ve noticed signage (for the most part) and textures are definitely a lot crisper on PC than it is on PS4 version: For example, At the border station in the opening moments of the nomad story line, I couldn’t read the text on the map of the United States due to it being so blurry. On the PC version, it was crystal clear. 

Cyberpunk 2077 also has a pretty amazing photo mode and you can pretty much activate it any time you want during the game then use the in-built editor to tweak things. All the images for this write up were taken with the photo mode and showcase just how damn good the game looks on PC. I’ve also captured some footage of the game play: No spoilers, really, it’s pretty early content.

So there you have it: I’m pleasantly surprised that my RX580, an 8Gb GPU that is hardly cutting edge these days, is able to play Cyberpunk 2077 comfortably and it looks good to boot.

Look, it’s clear to me that Cyberpunk 2077 is a much superior game on PC than it is on console and while I will be playing it on my PlayStation 5 now is not the time: I’ll play through it again with another story line once the next-generation (technically it’s current-generation) upgrade has been released. I have no idea when that will be, though.

For the time being, I’ll keep plugging away with the PC version, dreaming of the day I’ll be able to afford a card capable of ray tracing.

Spider-man Miles Morales review: A new generation, a new hero

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In Spider-man Miles Morales, the latest Spider-man game from longtime PlayStation darling developer Insomniac, we have a new hero for a new [console] generation.

Regular Spider-man [Peter Parker] has headed off on holiday with Mary Jane so Miles Morales is left in charge and has to protect New York city from the bad people – and guess what? Bad people come a-knocking in the guise of renegade revolutionaries the Underground and shady corporate figurehead Simon Krieger and his energy company Roxxon.

Miles was in Insomniac’s last Spider-man game and is the star of Netflix’s rather excellent Spider-man Into the Spiderverse animated movie and there’s a nice “Previously” feature at the beginning of the game that fills you in just in case you haven’t played the original game – or just plain forgot.

Right off the bat, Miles Morales looks fantastic on the PlayStation 5, with a much busier and detailed New York than the original Spider-man on PlayStation 4 [which has, incidentally, been remastered for the PlayStation 5, by the way]. Texture work is just insane on Miles and his spidey suits and Insomniac really have nailed, again, the swinging through the city streets mechanic.

The biggest thing that has impressed with with Miles Morales, though, is the super quick load times off the PS5 SSD. From pressing “continue” on the game’s menu screen to being in-game, it’s a scant four seconds. Four seconds. I know it’s four seconds because I counted every single time I played just to make sure that I wasn’t dreaming.

The PS5 version comes with two visual modes: Fidelity, which runs at 30PFS, 4K with all the graphical bells and whistles [impressive ray tracing, particle effects] and Performance which drops the resolution down [a bit] and removes the ray tracing and other things that will impact on high frame rates, delivering a pretty solid 60 frames per second.

With my eyes, I found it visually really hard to tell the difference between the two modes when I was zipping around New York. Sure, the fidelity mode looks a little bit prettier, especially with its ray tracing, but I played mostly in performance mode as movement just feels so much smoother as does combat which feels slower when dropping back to 30FPS. In fact, it’s quite jarring going back to 30 FPS with the fidelity mode, which I did sometimes only because I wanted to take some neat photos with the sweet ray tracing action.

As is the norm these days, Miles Morales has a pretty robust photo mode – although getting to it is a bit of a pain, especially when you’re mid-swing [You have to hit the pause button then scroll down to photo mode]. There must be a better way of accessing it that I don’t know about. All the photos in this review were taken from the game’s photo mode.

Spider-man Miles Morales is the game to show off to your friends and family just what the PS5 can do in terms of graphical grunt and speedy load times. It’s also a game that shows off what a talent development studio like Insomniac can do: I can only imagine what the company will be releasing with a few more years PS5 development experience under it’s already impressive belt.

I wait in anticipation.

D-Link DCS-8302LH HD wi-fi camera review

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For most people, their home is easily their most valuable asset so you want to keep an eye on it when you’re not there so the bad people don’t break in and steal your tech stuff and bikes. That would just make them cry.

An easy way to keep an eye on your house is by using a wi-fi security camera that lets you view footage beaming from the camera in real-time then record any dodgy persons or notifies you that there’s some motion around your house.

D-Link, more commonly know for its routers, also does wi-fi security cameras and kindly sent me along its DCS-8302LH camera to test out. It’s priced at $NZ250 and $AU200.

Set up was super easy using D-Link’s Mydlink ap and once up and running you can view a live feed or captured footage straight from the app. You can save footage to a microSD card (you’ll have to buy one as it doesn’t come with the camera), something called Onvif profile S recording or subscribe to Dlink’s cloud-based storage service.

There are several levels of the subscription service, ranging from free (which records and saves a day’s worth of footage to the cloud and allows up to three cameras) to yearly at $NZ99 a year (which saves a month’s worth at a time and lets you connect up to 10 cameras). Being of Scottish descent, I was happy with the free subscription as my motto is “If you can get something for free, why not?”

The DCS-8302LH has a 2 megapixel lens captures footage in full HD (1080p, 30FPS), has a two-way microphone and an IR sensor which lets you capture footage day and night, an ethernet port if you don’t want to connect it via wi-fi. The camera connects using the 802.11n/g wireless protocol over the 2.4Ghz band. The field of view is 135 degrees. Oh, there’s also a siren, if you’re wanting a siren to alert everyone.

You can also set the camera to capture using audio, motion or person detection and there is also a privacy mode. You can set the camera either indoors or outdoors (D-Link recommends if it’s outdoors it under house eves or shelter) but if you install it outside, you’ll need to ensure there is a fixed power source nearby as I don’t recommend an extension cord!

The D-Link DCS-8302LH in its natural habitat. Note the fluffy dog lurking nearby …

The only issue I had in setting up the camera was that the mounting bracket – which would let me secure the camera to a pole or wall – was already attached to the base of the camera and was incredibly hard to screw loose. Not that I planned to attach it to anything but I wanted to see how easy it was to do. I eventually had to use a bread & butter knife to twist it counter clockwise to loosen it as it seemed near impossible by hand. After that initial “assistance”, it was much easier to remove.

I tested the camera positioned in a variety of spots around my home, mostly to keep an eye on the dog while I’m away from home. It was generally positioned looking out a sliding door or similar. I also set it up looking out over the relatively busy road outside the front of our house that has plenty of cars, pedestrians and cyclists passing past every day. I received a few notifications over an afternoon alerting me to walkers wandering past on their daily constitutional. I was also able to take a snapshot of captured footage then save it to my phone, which is handy if someone breaks in and there’s a clear image of the offender.

I actually found that with the motion sensitivity set to its maximum the camera is incredibly sensitive to movement, meaning sometimes I’d several notifications a day sent to my phone which was actually just the wind blowing a tag on patio furniture that was in the camera’s field of view. One highlight of all the notifications, mind you, was that I witnessed captured footage of the dog trying (and failing spectacularly) to catch a flying insect that was buzzing around annoying him. It was amusing to say the least.

The camera also has a pretty good night mode: I set it up in the house one night, in the hallway, just to see how it looked and it captured me walking to the front door and the dog following behind and sent an alert to my phone. I contemplated leaving it running overnight but realised the dog would create multiple notifications!

Look, I was impressed with D-Link’s DCS-8302LH wifi camera and while it might not be the most featured security camera around (it doesn’t have automatic tilt function, for example) for me, it seemed a reasonably priced security camera that will give you much needed little piece of mind for you, your property and your loved ones.