Since release I've had issues running this with any combination of DLSS with RTX even on the new 1.5 on a 7200RPM HDD.

Today I moved it to a basic 552MB/s read SSD and I was able to turn off Slow HDD mode and enable every single option for RTX and use Quality DLSS with a rock solid stable frame rate even in heavy gun battles.

CPU: Ryzen 5 2600
RAM: 64000mhz 32GB
GPU: RTX 2070
RES: 1440p 165hz

If anyone is having performance issues running RTX toss it on an SSD.

For comparison it ran fine without RTX on a HDD, never lower than 60fps but spikes up to locked 165fps 2k (1440p) resolution

Texture streaming requires low latency and high throughput, basically any modern game requires an SSD.

Even an external SSD on USB-C will do, if for whatever reason you cannot upgrade your PC.

The fact that it worked for you with an HDD is an anomaly, maybe you had a crapton of free RAM that it could use for caching.

I ran it on Windows 7, a 12 year old CPU and a used 7200rpm mechanical HDD. It didn't run as well as I would have liked but it ran. It's definitely better on an SSD (built a new PC around Christmas with an SSD and a mechanical drive) but it is still doable on a traditional hard drive.

This - putting games on SSD is a no-brainer for a few years now.

Also - CP 2077 definately needs the newest graphic cards driver there is. After patching to 1.5 the performance dropped considerably on my 3060 (playing in 4K UHD, everything on high & RTX on ultra). Installing the latest nvidia driver corrected that and I can now play the game with the same awesome performance like before the patch - including the new shiny additions :)

Right on the money.

I moved to ssd 2011 and it was such a step up. So loading times have never been an issue for me in modern titles.
But it's a bit unfortionate that gamestudios so quickly started to "optimize" their games for ssd. It have celarly caused alot of issues for at lot of people with low framerate or textures not loading in in time.
If games were more optimized for ram, it could help alot with all the perfomance issues people are having.
Obviously everything don't have to be loaded into ram, but the stuff that's loaded over and over the most.
One can think in many ways when it comes to this. Specifically load the stuff that you know beforehand will be loaded the most, load all the biggest textures that will take a long time to load or load or the smallest textures that causes alot of seek time.

Im running a month old driver, time to update, thanks for the reminder!

This is the kind of optimization games used to do on, say, PS1 CDs. And it takes a lot of time to get right, often requiring modifications to the game engine.

...or we can spend that same time making sure the game actually comes out.

Now consider how poor CP2077 was when it came out: if the devs had been required to make that kind of optimization, there is a very good chance the game would have never been released at all.

Not every studio gets to release the same game three times (coughskyrimcough) with incremental optimization and treat it as if it were a new title.

Why whould you have to modify the game engine that much?
The engine allready has some kind of coding done to handle ram. You basically "only" need to check the filesize if you want all the smallest files in ram.
You can throw together a script that checks the filesize of all the files that then generates a list of all the files in order from smallest to biggest. Then try loading as many files as possible into ram.

It's obviously not that simple, but it shouldn't be too hard to optimize the games better for ram.

Depending on the API, you may not even *know* what is in RAM.

Generally speaking, the OS tries to make everything as transparent as possible to applications, meaning your actual RAM usage is often entirely opaque (you don't know if "it's in RAM" actually means "in RAM" or "somewhere on a RAM.mapped file"); GPU drivers may not even allow you to peek into the internals of the GPU memory (this used to be a known issue in WINE, for example, since DX9/10 gave you information that OpenGL simply did not provide, making it effectively impossible for WINE to replicate some of the DX API, I'm not sure how bad the Vulkan/DX12 divide is).

If you want to go cross-platform, or just support multiple versions of the same platform, you have to optimize each platform individually, and optimization introduces bugs - -O2 in gcc is kown to break programs, and that is a *compiler option*, something that should be perfectly safe; manual optimization is an entire order of magnitude worse.

If you are coding for a single platform with a single program running on it (i.e., making an exclusive console game), you may be able to optimize your game to take advantage of the platform's specific characteristics, but the moment you need to port it you've shot yorself in the foot.

Yeah…game definitely needs an ssd. I installed it onto an NVME initially and didn’t have the misfortune of any performance issues. I get a very stable 60-90 fps all max settings, Psycho ray tracing, balanced DLSS@1440p with a 3080 and a 10900f. The only dips I get so far are at Lizzy’s bar or whatever it’s called. Then it dips to around 51 fps, but gsync covers it well.

I did notice, however, that you gotta disable that hdd mode or whatever it’s called. If that is on, even if you have an ssd installed, the game will start throwing duplicate characters all over and limiting crowd density. The game has poor auto detection.