Why is this game's pop in so terrible specifically?

[Slippery Williams]

I've played tons of open world games and sure now and again you'll see assets and textures pop in if you drive too fast, but why specifically is Cyberpunk's so terrible? I'm not really tech savvy but why do other huge free roam open world games have little to no pop in and this game I'm driving on invisible roads, enemy NPC gangs spawn in around me because I ran in the mddle of where they should of spawned etc?

Edit: updated to show what specs I have to see if there is any obvious issue

Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-6600 CPU @ 3.30GHz
Nivada GeForce GTX 970
16gb ram
HDD

EDIT 2: Just wanted to give an update. Played for 30 hours, hitting escape to let the game load when it needed to. Bought and installed the game to an SSD and so far it runs way better, faster and I’ve not seen those issues from my OP

[Crimsomrider]

No other open-world game takes place in such a vastly intricate, crowded and dense metropolis that is so full of detail and visual fidelity. So in order to make the game playable there have to be sacrifices, in this case pop in.

Personally though on a Ryzen 5950x and RTX 3080Ti my roads are not empty nor anything is spawning in my face. the city is overcrowded for me. You playing on an HDD by any chance?

[1% Aoukar]

they turned down certain settings so grandad pc owners can run the game at ultra settings and not complain

[easy_going]

Originally posted by Crimsomrider:

No other open-world game takes place in such a vastly intricate, crowded and dense metropolis that is so full of detail and visual fidelity. So in order to make the game playable there have to be sacrifices, in this case pop in.

Personally though on a Ryzen 5950x and RTX 3080Ti my roads are not empty nor anything is spawning in my face. the city is overcrowded for me. You playing on an HDD by any chance?

I have Ryzen 5800x and RTX3080
Pop-in happens just as much on my hardware as it happens on OP's and on yours. It has nothing to do with hardware. If we use exactly the same graphical settings, the pop-in will be the same.
"Graphical fidelity" is as worthless as high framerate accompanied by stutter. It's as worthless as great quests you can't finish because they bug out.

It's impossible to enjoy something that simply doesn't work as intended.

[Torpex]

May be RAM and SSD makes a difference? My rig has 32Gb RAM and Nvme m2 (firecuda).

NC is packed with people and cars for me. Literally crowds, so when I run i bump into people and they react with obscenities.

[Ulvhamne]

Originally posted by easy_going:

Originally posted by Crimsomrider:

No other open-world game takes place in such a vastly intricate, crowded and dense metropolis that is so full of detail and visual fidelity. So in order to make the game playable there have to be sacrifices, in this case pop in.

Personally though on a Ryzen 5950x and RTX 3080Ti my roads are not empty nor anything is spawning in my face. the city is overcrowded for me. You playing on an HDD by any chance?

I have Ryzen 5800x and RTX3080
Pop-in happens just as much on my hardware as it happens on OP's and on yours. It has nothing to do with hardware. If we use exactly the same graphical settings, the pop-in will be the same.
"Graphical fidelity" is as worthless as high framerate accompanied by stutter. It's as worthless as great quests you can't finish because they bug out.

It's impossible to enjoy something that simply doesn't work as intended.

I stopped having pop in and t posing when I got myself an m.2 drive to run the game from. I still occasionally get a pop in that's noticeable. Like every 30 hours or so maybe? The pop in has more to do with memory and harddrive than GFX and CPU. Unless you are running a dog slow CPU I guess, but you're not.

[Zebedee]

I believe Auokar is correct but for me it's purely from personal impression patch to patch. They seemed to have altered things to try and reduce the number of issues being reported. With min specs being raised, it will be interesting to see if they feel they can increase draw distances once again.

That said, if you're seeing extreme pop-in currently then it's a usually a result of installing to a HDD (cars and pedestrians in particular - "empty roads" in the OP makes me wonder) or a need to dial settings back a bit.

[Ra 'alga0]

This game has the best visual quality and highest density of any open world game I have ever played. That said; I have never suffered from pop-in issues when playing this game, even on my old PC back when the game launched. My old system was already fairly high spec though to be fair.

[V]

Originally posted by Crimsomrider:

No other open-world game takes place in such a vastly intricate, crowded and dense metropolis that is so full of detail and visual fidelity. So in order to make the game playable there have to be sacrifices, in this case pop in.

Personally though on a Ryzen 5950x and RTX 3080Ti my roads are not empty nor anything is spawning in my face. the city is overcrowded for me. You playing on an HDD by any chance?

GTA 4 has more intricate interiors and map building than this game and never had that kind of pop problems and i'd bet that when gta 6 comes out neither will that, Night City is just aesthetically pleasing and gives off the image of half of what plenty other games have already done it just looks better here....the problem is with the makers of the game they don't have that much experience in what they are doing and are making the most of what they know and doing very well considering.

Its always irritating to me when people claim its because its so graphically demanding when in reality it actually isn't its pretty standard for games of this generation its just not optimised to the level of most professional game companies that have been doing it for way longer than CDPR its always a odd excuse when people overblow Cyberpunk's demand imo.

[Crimsomrider]

Originally posted by easy_going:

Pop-in happens just as much on my hardware as it happens on OP's and on yours. It has nothing to do with hardware. If we use exactly the same graphical settings, the pop-in will be the same.

"Graphical fidelity" is as worthless as high framerate accompanied by stutter. It's as worthless as great quests you can't finish because they bug out.

Never claimed that pop-in is caused by hardware, as I've explained why it is so obvious at times in the game. My question about the HDD was because the OP mentioned having completely empty streets and entire groups of enemies spawning right in their face, which is absolutely not normal.

So either their hardware is not up to par or they have some very weird bug going on.

As for stutters and quests bugging out, got zero stutters on my end and every quest I was able to finish without a hitch during my long playthrough through several updates. So not sure what to say about that, but clearly experiences vary in that regard. Mine was consistent and smooth.

[Jin-]

Originally posted by Ulvhamne:

Originally posted by easy_going:

I have Ryzen 5800x and RTX3080
Pop-in happens just as much on my hardware as it happens on OP's and on yours. It has nothing to do with hardware. If we use exactly the same graphical settings, the pop-in will be the same.
"Graphical fidelity" is as worthless as high framerate accompanied by stutter. It's as worthless as great quests you can't finish because they bug out.

It's impossible to enjoy something that simply doesn't work as intended.

I stopped having pop in and t posing when I got myself an m.2 drive to run the game from. I still occasionally get a pop in that's noticeable. Like every 30 hours or so maybe? The pop in has more to do with memory and harddrive than GFX and CPU. Unless you are running a dog slow CPU I guess, but you're not.

Half correct, games have set values on distance when the specific object loads. Like X tree will spawn when you go near 100m of it. Billboard spawns when you are 20m from it. This kind of pop in will happen no matter the hardware unless you mod it which helps with the issue but creates a huge strain on the hardware. The faster you move the easier its to notice, simple as that.

OP it won't be fixed, it's there to increase the performance and exist in any game, especially in large open worlds, yes even in GTA

Then again if we are talking about objects not loading at all or delayed loading, like in ps2/xbox360 GTAs, driving quickly and hitting invincible walls/objects? That's pure hardware problem.

[egg fu]

i understand the draw distance being bad in some cases but driving on invisible roads and having delayed enemy spawns because it isn't being loaded in correctly or fast enough? sounds drive related tbh

[easy_going]

Go watch the opening few seconds of Phantom Liberty trailer. The one that starts with you and Johnny in some sort of flying vehicle. Look at the city and how the buildings and the billboards pop into existence as you are getting closer. I've never seen something like that in any other Tripple-A game when similar scene was taking place. Every other big budget game could figure it out and pull it off except this one.

All the animated billboards being identical in the distance and changing into randomly generated ones once you are a bit closer is not caused by hardware, as shown at each and every gameplay recorded on best available PCs.

Ray Tracing drawing 30 feet ahead of you is also not caused by hard drive limitations. If I switched from my SSD sata drive to M.2 SSD, I doubt those would be improved. If I switched to RTX4090 with all the vRAM in the world, I'd get the same result.

[Slippery Williams]

Updated my origonal post with my PC specs to see if there is any obvious fix. I'm not too savvy with tech stuff (A buddy built it for me so I could run doom 2016 on it when that came out). Aside from the open world pop in and some slow pop in on the menu screens the game runs really well when I'm not driving around or running too fast in the main city. When missions start the game generally makes time to load ♥♥♥♥ in cause they are linear and event flag based so I get no issues

[Crimsomrider]

Unfortunately as suspected your HDD is what's causing your streets to be completely empty, along with slow loading of assets and enemies spawning right in your face around you.

Cyberpunk is a very demanding game with a ton of stuff to load in and HDDs simply never played nice with it, which is why they're not going to be actively supported anymore come September.

And the PC is also the absolute bare-minimum recommended specs to run the game. You can solve the issues mentioned by getting yourself an SSD. It won't solve the pop-ins because everyone gets those, but it may fix the empty streets and weird spawning even on such PC.

Even when I played the game back on my GTX980/i7-4790k, I was on an SSD and my streets were swarming with life.

[Entoarox]

It is the downside of having such a dense game environment, there is so much stuff all so close together, that unless you have a beefy PC compromises have to be made.

Playing this game without a SSD is nearly impossible, the amount of textures and models that need to be swapped in and out (Especially while moving fast, like when driving) is so large that HDD's just cannot reasonably keep up.

If you look at any other open world game, you will find that they are far more spread out, there is simply far more distance between content then there is in cyberpunk.

This is also why cyberpunk is one of the first true open *cities*
They likely could have made things more performance-friendly, but the cost would have been having loading screen on most, if not all, interior areas.

Why do you think there are almost always elevators when entering large interior areas? This is essentially giving the game extra time to swap between the indoor/outdoor LOD's, in a believable fashion, and without adding loading screens.

This is simply the main bottleneck for current-gen gaming, and is why Direct Storage technology and similar (Allowing the GPU to access SDD's directly) are being worked on so hard, we are at the point where the latency of files having to pass through the CPU when getting loaded into graphics memory is a massive performance bottleneck.

Unfortunately, unless we start packing every GPU with 30GB memory at a minimum, or find a way to make 4k+ textures that require less space, this is just how things are.