Cyberpunk 2077 Revisited - Great game on a decent PC

This is a game I grabbed then refunded more than once, because as we
know it was a mess on release... and even after many patches/updates
and the reviews began turning in its favor, I still found something
offputting about it, even when purchased on sale.

That experience was on a Core i9-9900k that I bought in 2018 though.
I've been going about 6+ years without any interim upgrades to my
primary PC.  What a difference six years makes.

It was time to upgrade (although, different from times past my primary
rig build is geared more toward content creation/productivity than
gaming, since I spend more time on that sort of workload these
days)... and the upgrade prompted me to give Cyberpunk another try.

It's like a night and day difference.  Granted, this upgrade is
notable in the sense that I made the leap from 1080p to 1440p, which
in itself adds more to the visual experience.  But it's more than
that..  it's a combination of maxed out visual settings and buttery
smooth performance, and how important that is to immersion.  It adds
enough to the experience that unlike many games I have no interest in
skipping the cutscene dialog, it makes me want to understand the
characters at the level the designers intended.

So yeah, it was a reminder that the difference between a crappy (or in
my case just an outdated) PC and a high-end one can make the
difference between an insta-refund and a great game.