A player launched Cyberpunk 2077 on a graphics card with 1 GB of memory at 40 FPS
An enthusiast decided to test how far the optimization of the RPG-action Cyberpunk 2077 could be pushed and attempted to run it on a very weak GPU: an AMD Radeon R7 370 with only 1 GB of GDDR5.
The aim wasn’t merely to get the CD Projekt RED title to start; the challenge was to reach something you could actually play. With stock lowest settings and FSR scaling turned on, the game produced roughly 22–25 FPS and frequent stutters — not great, and often unusable.
So the player went in deeper, editing the usersettings.json files and adding custom flags for the REDengine. Through extensive tuning he stripped out a long list of features: global illumination, screen-space reflections, volumetric fog, bloom, motion blur, chromatic aberration, film grain, lens flares, anti-aliasing, dynamic decals — basically anything that chewed GPU cycles.
A decisive move was forcing the render resolution down to 640x480 and using integer scaling for full-screen output. FSR was switched off too; at that tiny base res it actually added overhead on the old GPU architecture rather than helping.
After the changes, the built-in benchmark gave an average of about 44 FPS, with vid mem staying strictly within 1 GB. In real driving around Night City the counter sat near 38–40 FPS; combat fights dropped to roughly 25–35 FPS; some tight interior areas even spiked close to 50 FPS.
Visually the game lost a lot — think old-console flat lighting and a stripped aesthetic. Still, the experiment demonstrates that, with patience and lots of manual tweaking, the engine can be coaxed into running on hardware far below the official reqs. It’s playable in places, awkward in others — YMMV, and not something most players will want to live with for long.