Update 2.1 LOD issues and low textures (2024)

After updating to Patch 2.1, updating drivers to 546.29, I have noticed a reduction in graphical quality, LOD bugs, and many other graphical issues. Path Tracing and changes to DLSS have reintroduced ghosting again, and light reflections of glass or metallic surfaces are bouncing many sharp white dots back towards player pov.

The city looks bland with 2.1 optimizations. There is less detail around the city. Streets seem empty, less trees, bushes, sewer holes, lights, etc. The lack of detail has made night city less interesting.

BabaBooey88 said:

Add tourist binoculars to show off your city - looks like a PS3 game on PC max settings.

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Were we expecting something else?

How would you fix it, temporarily crank the draw distance and lod detail? Load a special viewing instance?

Funny though.

Nixilos said:

Were we expecting something else?

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Nah, when I saw that in the stream my immediate thought was "bruh". The game is beautiful and most of the LOD stuff doesn't bother me, especially considering just how much stuff is on screen - makes sense. It's mostly the lower rres texture that get me, especially on the megabuildings. They look like shiiiiiiiit sometimes. An LOD 0 mode for big PeeCee gamers would be nice but I don't expect that.

Nixilos said:

How would you fix it, temporarily crank the draw distance and lod detail? Load a special viewing instance?

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Photomode does something to that effect. I haven't used these because they ended up being what I expected, but perhaps that's what they should be.

I mean, there are still issues like this happening, and I reported the bug more than one year ago. Look at the street lights...
And the second picture also shows that there is no support for ultra wide monitors in the game menus, which is a problem for OLED displays, aka burn in...

Noticed the same streetlight LOD bug myself prior to 2.1. It's frustrating.

But now LODs are absolutely F**KED with 2.1... Check my post out - https://forums.cdprojektred.com/index.php?threads/2-1-patch-lod-issues-other-stuff.11126416/ - the entire Dogtown pyramid disappearing as you walk is just ludicrous!

I agree. I thought the game/LOD looked different when I loaded up the game after patching to 2.1. Some of the NPCs that aren't even that far away, look like characters from Goldeneye on N64, until you get a little closer.

Also, I'm not sure if it was like this before the patch but enabling ray reconstruction makes a lot of the effects, like bullet tracers, fire, sparks where bullet hits a metal object etc. look SUPER pixelated and low res.

Definitely feel the game looks worse visually than it did in 2.0.

BabaBooey88 said:

Add tourist binoculars to show off your city - looks like a PS3 game on PC max settings.

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I replied to one of the major devs on twitter and pointed out how one look at the forums and even some reddit threads paints a pretty bleak picture of the game due to the amount of new bugs.

He seemed completely oblivious to the situation.

Makes me wonder if the QA department even communicates with the main team, or if their findings are just passed on as notes on a small piece of paper during lunch break that accidentally get thrown into the bin alongside the soda cans

weaselciuy said:

I dont have that street lights issue at all. Even at Low quality they look way better than your pic.
Maybe you are using Texture Filtering Quality in AMD/Nvidia panel at Performance instead of Standard or High Quality?
I`d also refrain from using FSR, instead XeSS is much better (intel Balanced equals FSR Quality mode). And ofc disable AMD Boost, Super Ress and other similar up scaling options. Also Amds Morphological AA option tends to make surfaces blurry.
Either way, hard to tell with PCs, each is unique and needs its own tweaks.

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Nah, man. This is a very common issue that has nothing to do with image upscaling lmao. PC, absolute max settings on a 4090 with DLSS, same as @Malautomedontolo , and I get it as well.

It's the game. The game has some major issues, to the point where even save files can be drastically different. On one save file the weather has a peculiar bug where the sun renders through the cloud(even rain) in certain regions of the world, on another save said bug isn't present but carries another bug where the light above V's apartment door is missing along with other lights, then another save has neither of those bugs but has an exposure bug in the Aldecaldos camp.

Tested with each update just for observation - Those bugs are baked into those saves.

Some of the game's issues will never be fixed, I understand that for sure. Pretending they don't exist won't help at all though.

Post automatically merged: Dec 20, 2023

Orikon25 said:

I replied to one of the major devs on twitter and pointed out how one look at the forums and even some reddit threads paints a pretty bleak picture of the game due to the amount of new bugs.

He seemed completely oblivious to the situation.

Makes me wonder if the QA department even communicates with the main team, or if their findings are just passed on as notes on a small piece of paper during lunch break that accidentally get thrown into the bin alongside the soda cans

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Was he receptive or defensive about the information? Just curious

well, 1st off i`m not pretending, game really works almost at Max and i`m not having major issues especially graphical, just some gameplay Npc bugs where they get stuck mid combat. All i`m missing is more RT power, everything else is on MAX at 2K with a simple 6800XT. It looks gorgeous, can push it even better looking (skipping FSR) with pure render but then I must skip RT reflections.

FSR/Dlss kind of suck in my opinion, software tricks; have you tried Pure Render or XeSS since you boast such a powerful card?
i got a 3080 laptop where i skip Dlss because I can clearly tell the low quality tricks employed. Either pure render or Xess if supported works for my glorified taste.

Texture quality issues tend to be memory related, either card drivers are busted or system poorly configured for it. There is no way for me to reproduce that low quality you pointed out even at Low settings. Refresh game, refresh drivers, game might not be optimized well for your cards, either way i bet its a software issue reading memory.
Also, i would start a new game and refrain from using old 1.6 or such saves, considering the horrid launch game started with, ofc things carry on. This game especially.

BabaBooey88 said:

Nah, man. This is a very common issue that has nothing to do with image upscaling lmao. PC, absolute max settings on a 4090 with DLSS, same as @Malautomedontolo , and I get it as well.

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-Edited because I was wrong,- the street lights textures in Northside Watson are indeed bugged. As showcased in my next post..

Cz_BladE said:

I´m not denying that 2.1 doesn´t have bunch of issues, but I´ve never seen this street lights issue in any of my playthroughs either, even now in 2.1- the lights are highly detailed.

-I´m all in for speaking out about all the issues that the game has after 2.0 and 2.1, but I have a feeling a lot of people have issues that are more connected to their messed up driver installs or corrupted game files I´m afraid. Or because of using older save files from before 2.0 version.

-Before making any reports on issues that are not the game´s fault, I would recommend to try: installing the newest GPU drivers and making sure to use DDU in safe mode when uninstalling the previous drivers.

-Verifying the game´s files and if that doesn´t help, try doing completely clean install following these instructions: How do I perform a clean install of the game? — Cyberpunk 2077 | Technical Support — CD PROJEKT RED

These texture issues should not be happening..

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Sorry, that has nothing to do with video drivers or DDU. That is a LOD issue, it's the game failing to load the full detail mesh for some coding mistake, probably telling to use the low poly model at close distance in place of the correct one. Nothing is corrupted on my side, I've even started a fresh playthrough just to make sure there is no bug "baked" in my older savegames. I deleted everything and reinstalled the game from scratch, deleted every config file, mod... You name it.

Did you try going to that specific location on the map? It doesn't occur anywhere, just in Northside as far as I know. Unfortunately there is a considerable amount of things like this that have been overlooked. I get it, the game is huge and all, but with all our reports/beta testing over the years they should have been fixed by now, specially considering CDP has no problem saying the game is finally complete and all. It's not the case I'm afraid. I've been playing this since day one and I'm aware of what has been corrected and what is still broken. Despite all this, I greatly appreciate all the efforts and the hard work, but why do they keep slipping on that banana peel all the time?! It's been a constant "fix one, break two".

Malautomedontolo said:

Sorry, that has nothing to do with video drivers or DDU. That is a LOD issue, it's the game failing to load the full detail mesh for some coding mistake, probably telling to use the low poly model at close distance in place of the correct one. Nothing is corrupted on my side, I've even started a fresh playthrough just to make sure there is no bug "baked" in my older savegames. I deleted everything and reinstalled the game from scratch, deleted every config file, mod... You name it.

Did you try going to that specific location on the map? It doesn't occur anywhere, just in Northside as far as I know.

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You are correct, I apologize. I just tried going into the Northside Watson area and most of the traffic lights there are indeed low resolution. And it does seem to be only happening in the Northside part of the map.

-I already reported it to CDPR, showcasing the issue in a video I recorded: Traffic Lights Texture Issue in Northside Watson (2.1) (youtube.com)

Hopefully they will finally fix this issue and all the other LoD problems introduced with 2.0 in the upcoming patches.

Cz_BladE said:

You are correct, I apologize. I just tried going into the Northside Watson area and most of the traffic lights there are low resolution indeed. And it does seem to be only happening in the Northside part of the map.

-I already reported it to CDPR, showcasing the issue in a video I recorded: Traffic Lights Texture Issue in Northside Watson (2.1) (youtube.com)

Hopefully they will finally fix this issue and all the other LoD problems introduced with 2.0 in the upcoming patches.

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The more time I spend on this forums the more I realize you're an absolute freaking legend who is doing the work of an entire Q&A department all on his own.

Just remember to take ibuprofen regularly. Carrying the quality of an entire game on your back must hurt like hell at this point.

Malautomedontolo said:

Sorry, that has nothing to do with video drivers or DDU. That is a LOD issue, it's the game failing to load the full detail mesh for some coding mistake, probably telling to use the low poly model at close distance in place of the correct one. Nothing is corrupted on my side, I've even started a fresh playthrough just to make sure there is no bug "baked" in my older savegames. I deleted everything and reinstalled the game from scratch, deleted every config file, mod... You name it.

Did you try going to that specific location on the map? It doesn't occur anywhere, just in Northside as far as I know. Unfortunately there is a considerable amount of things like this that have been overlooked. I get it, the game is huge and all, but with all our reports/beta testing over the years they should have been fixed by now, specially considering CDP has no problem saying the game is finally complete and all. It's not the case I'm afraid. I've been playing this since day one and I'm aware of what has been corrected and what is still broken. Despite all this, I greatly appreciate all the efforts and the hard work, but why do they keep slipping on that banana peel all the time?! It's been a constant "fix one, break two".

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Looks like a streaming sector issue. A lot of this stuff is embedded in the sector, rather than an instance. That was the big change in 1.5 that makes LOD mods impossible from what I'm aware. It's also why I can't mod in street lights that penetrate vehicle cabin's - I would have to edit every sector in the game fyi.

Orikon25 said:

The more time I spend on this forums the more I realize you're an absolute freaking legend who is doing the work of an entire Q&A department all on his own.

Just remember to take ibuprofen regularly. Carrying the quality of an entire game on your back must hurt like hell at this point.

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Thanks I appreciate it, it´s simple I just really like the game- even though CDPR sometimes makes it really hard

BabaBooey88 said:

Looks like a streaming sector issue. A lot of this stuff is embedded in the sector, rather than an instance. That was the big change in 1.5 that makes LOD mods impossible from what I'm aware. It's also why I can't mod in street lights that penetrate vehicle cabin's - I would have to edit every sector in the game fyi.

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Ouch that sucks. I guess it made their life easier but modding a nightmare. I hope they will release better tools someday.

Apart from this, did you also notice that shadows from the vegetation do not move anymore? Since when did this start? Normal shadowmaps still work but ray traced ones are totally static.