Firstly, I couldn't start the game. Crash on startup. Downloaded latest NVIDIA drivers (I thought mine were current, but they weren't) and then I could boot the game. As the thread title says, game now boots fine, character creation is fine...but as soon as the game actually begins, my character (I chose Corpo path) vomits on a table then the game crashes with a "Woah, Cyberpunk 2077 has flatlined!" error. Nothing I can do or change in the settings will get me past this point.

Steps I've taken include :-

-Updated to latest NVIDIA drivers (460.79)
-Verified game files
-Disabled GOG overlay
-Set "Max Frames" to 60
-Tried VSync on/off (basically, messed about with all the settings, doesn't make a difference)

None of these fix the problem.

I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate 64 on a i5 3570K (yes, it has AVX according to CPU-Z), Geforce 1080 and 16gb of RAM.

Haven't had any issue with literally any other game I've ever played. And I've played a lot. I understand from what I've read that it's probably just the game itself (or it's interaction with the drivers) and that there's nothing I can do until either the game gets patched or new drivers are released but I figured maybe there might be some thing I haven't tried that someone could point me to.

Anyone had the same experience?

EDIT:- Reinstalled the game and low and behold, it works. Barely. Managed to get into the game, get to the bar (Corpo start) and by that point I just turned it off. It ran like absolute molasses. I'm on a rig that can run The Witcher 3, Doom Eternal, Baldur's Gate 3, Total War: Warhammer 2 (known to be a system hog), etc all on max settings at well above 60 FPS. At "ultra" on this game I was averaging about 20.

Looks like I'm just gonna have to wait a few weeks for patches, optimisations and driver updates to improve the performance. If I can't play it smooth on high settings, it's not worth it for me I've got a healthy backlog I can start chunking through in the meantime.

Gonna try redownloading/reinstalling now.

I doubt it will work as I'm leaning toward thinking this issue (which seems pretty widespread, from what I've read lots of people are having the same issue) will only be resolved when the game is patched and/or new NVIDIA drivers are released.

Will update the OP when I've completed the reinstall to let people know if it made a difference.

Well, the reinstall seemed to work. Game loaded, could actually play it. But...the performance was terrible. See my OP for the details.