I5 3450 has a bottleneck issue
I5 3450 has a bottleneck issue
I'm setting up my cyberpunk 2077 on a 6-year-old system with an i5 3450 and a slightly overclocked GTX970. The CPU boosts to 3.5 and stays at that level consistently, with temperatures around 60-70 degrees. At lower and medium settings, I usually get 30-45 FPS, but my frame rate drops to about 80% when driving, even at high speeds. This suggests the GPU isn't getting enough frames from the CPU. Although my motherboard doesn’t support overclocking, I’m wondering if there’s anything I can try to improve performance.
You're running on moderate performance, which means your CPU is usually doing most of the work. Adjust your game settings to lower the intensity of CPU-heavy tasks and raise the demand on your GPU. If you maintain around 45 FPS while doing this, you can slightly boost GPU-intensive options without noticeably affecting performance.
The options available are limited. If you're concerned about the slow performance (around 80% or worse), adjusting the graphics settings might help maintain smoother operation. Be aware your device is quite old—PS4 and Xbox 1 running CP77 at 720/900p typically struggles below 30 fps, so significant improvements aren't likely.
Your processor performance is under the suggested standards, especially compared to your graphics card. You may want to think about upgrading to an i7 or a comparable Xeon chip.