Cyberpunk is *Almost* Perfect on Xbox Series S

One frustrating visual flaw holds back amazing performance

No, the flaw isn’t the way this lady’s fingers clip into her arm. This NPC mostly looked amazing. Clipping is hard. This is running on a three hundred dollar box. Cyberpunk 2077 Xbox Series S screenshot taken by the author.

A year has passed since I last took a look at Cyberpunk 2077 from a technical perspective. Far from the mess it was three years ago, it’s now a true RPG treat. Last time, after weighing different levels of performance compared to the hardware you’d have to buy to get them, I concluded that the PS5 was the best Cyberpunk-playing machine.

Since then, the game has had so much more work done to it. It got a paid expansion in Phantom Liberty that might just be my favorite game released this year. It also received numerous updates, including one that overhauled most of the game’s core game design. That was unheard of. In a show of marketing force tied to a new physical release, CD Projekt released another big one just today that finally opened the game’s metro stations. That’s neat, I guess, but not really what brings me here today.

See, a number of months ago they added a 60FPS performance mode to the game on the Xbox Series S. And it’s stunning.

It throws my whole “best bang for the buck” premise into potential disarray. The Series S still goes for a market shattering $300, and although it doesn’t always deliver at the same level as its slightly more expensive siblings, it remains a fair amount of…