Skip to main content

Digital Trends may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site. Why trust us?

‘Cyberpunk 2077’ E3 build used a hefty PC, but can your system keep up?

It’s safe to say that CD Projekt Red’s latest game Cyberpunk 2077 has impressed critics at E3 2018. The first-person role-playing game surprised us with its perspective, world, and combat, and we ended up awarding the game our Best in Show prize for the entire event. If you want to play the game on PC with the detail and fidelity on display at E3, however, you’re going to need a pretty powerful rig.

Recommended Videos

CD Projekt Red revealed the PC specifications used during its E3 2018 demonstrations in the Cyberpunk 2077 Discord, and replicating them won’t be cheap. An Intel i7-8700K GPU at 3.7 GHz was used, as was a GTX 1080 Ti GPU — the latter goes for around $700 right now.

Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming
Check your inbox!

Also used were two 16GB G.Skill Ripjaws V Series DDR4 RAM cards, which currently go for about $400 on Amazon in a two-pack. An Asus Rog STRIX Z370-I served as the motherboard, and a Samsung 960 Pro 512GB M.2 PCIe SSD was also installed. Lastly, a Corsair SF600 PSU powered the rig, and sells for a little over $100.

These specifications are all far beyond what CD Projekt Red recommended for its 2015 game The Witcher III: Wild Hunt. That role-playing game needed only 6GB of RAM and a GTX 770 GPU with 2GB of VRAM in order to run at optimum performance.

With Cyberpunk 2077, however, CD Projekt Red is capable of running the game at much more impressive settings, and it has us wondering if the game is actually going to also release on the Xbox One and PlayStation, or if it’s secretly being developed for their successors.

Speaking to Game Informer, quest designer Patrick Mills said that his studio is still targeting Xbox One and PlayStation 4, and the game was featured at the tail-end of Microsoft’s Xbox One conference during E3.

If the next-generation consoles are just a few years away, we hope Cyberpunk 2077 also releases for them, as we would like to get an experience similar to what high-end PCs can offer. Of course, by that point, the specifications provided above will seem like nothing. It’s a never-ending chase for a perfect machine that will never exist, but perhaps the chase is more important than the finish line.

Gabe Gurwin
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Gabe Gurwin has been playing games since 1997, beginning with the N64 and the Super Nintendo. He began his journalism career…
How does Cyberpunk 2077 run in 2022? Benchmarks, DLSS 3, and ray tracing tested
Cyberpunk 2077 on the MSI Optix MPG 32 QD.

Even two years after release, Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the most demanding games you can play. Developer CD Projekt Red is constantly updating it with new features and graphics settings as well, including settings like DLSS 3. We plugged back into Night City to see how well the game runs in 2022.

We have loads of benchmarks below, including DLSS 3 and ray tracing testing, so you can get a grip on how well Cyberpunk 2077 performs and how you can optimize the game. Although it's one of the most demanding PC games available today, there's a lot of room to optimize your performance.
Cyberpunk 2077 system requirements

Read more
Cyberpunk 2077’s Steam success is great, but we can’t rewrite its history
Jackie from Cyberpunk 2077 with a gun pointed at his head.

Cyberpunk 2077 has seen a huge resurgence as of late, thanks largely to the success of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, Netflix's new and critically acclaimed anime adaptation of the sci-fi property. According to the global PR director at CD Projekt Red on Twitter, viewers watched 14,880,000 hours of the show in just the first week, putting it safely in Netflix’s top 10.

This has been a great boon for the game, which launched in a poor, unfinished state at the end of 2020, and has been getting gradual updates ever since to make it playable, improve on features like skill trees, and add new ones like wardrobe transmogrification. While it sold well at the start of its life cycle, there hasn’t been a spike in the number of players since then. At the time of this writing, however, Cyberpunk 2077 is the eighth most played game on Steam, according to SteamDB, and has nearly 100,000 concurrent players, although it peaked at 1 million players.

Read more
E3 2023 returns in June with separate business and consumer days
The logo for E3 2023.

E3 2023 will return as an in-person event from June 13 to June 16, 2023, as announced by ReedPop today.

The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) already revealed that E3 will return in 2023, but now we know exactly when the event will take place, along with several other key details. E3 will once again take place at the Los Angeles Convention Center after a four-year hiatus, but will incorporate separate days for industry professionals and general consumers.

Read more