The Witcher 3 Discussion Thread!

People with Titan X and 980M SLI can't even max out game at 1080p60. Call it "optimized".

LOL

 

Yes it also struggles worse when playing the game in true cinema 4k with three gtx 980s and 64g gigs of ram on a desktop it's pretty ridiculous maybe another broken release the game is fun but this company just another hyped up game but i will give it benefit of doubt for the time being until i get further into playing it.

 

An open world game with no loads between areas, no less.

Witcher 2 has loads just going into a house, so it's rendering astronomically less.

 

Tell that to GTA V, which both looks and runs better. There's really no excuse for graphical downgrade and poor optimization.

 

I hope digital foundry will post tommorow face off ps4 vs xbox vs pc for witcher 3.Im pretty sure ps4 and xbox run high setting with almost steady 30fps.This will just prove how bad its optimized.Only shadows,foliage distance,hbao have impact all other options dont impact framerate or unnoticeable impact.

 

The Titan X can't max this out? Wow.

Pascal, where art thou.

 

100% agree. GTA V's grass looks excellent, and I still get 45+ FPS in grassy, forested areas with Very High settings.

 

Wait? What? I think you mean Titan "classic".

 

Nah, I mean Titan X. It jumps from high 50's to high 90's. Hairworks is not optimized:

Spoiler: Image

If you turn off the hairworks, it stays up there around the 80's & 90's, and beyond.

Just wait until the SnowDrop engine comes in The Division next year. Holy crap, FPS spikes and dips.

 

The only settings that wreck systems are ultra Hairworks and Foilage range. Turn those down and 60fps is piss easy to achieve.

I seriously don't think some of you know what optimization really means.

 

Really now? According to this only a 980M can achieve 60 FPS with those reduced settings:



So I wouldn't exactly call it "piss easy".

 

I dont think its accurate cause i should than have 30fps without aa on that settings cause i always have performance similar to 260x/750ti but im miles away from that haha.I can achieve that on 900p on low.Still waiting for kepler optimisation
edit:they probably benchmarked a not demanding scene

 

Yeah. The way the phrases "poorly optimized" and "badly optimized" get thrown around you'd think they mean "anything less than 120 frames per second at 4K resolution with all the eye candy turned on and set to maximum." No, that's not what optimized means. Optimized means utilizing available resources efficiently and effectively.

 

Well this is hilarious. Remember the system requirements?

Minimum: GTX 660 or 7870

Recommended: GTX 770 or R9 290

Now look at the chart I posted above.

660: 30 FPS
7870: 41 FPS

770: 46 FPS
290: 71 FPS

Dat #KeplerOptimization

 

hmm....shadows seems to be really pushing the GPU temps up for me so i chucked them to medium (from high) and the game seems to be staying below 70 degrees C....though i did set the resolution to 1600x900.

 

Were you referring to me? I was speaking to Hairworks. And if so, yes, I know exactly what "optimized" means.

 

Which TW3 isn't doing. VRAM usage with TW3, for reasons unknown, does not exceed 800MB for me. I get around 35-40 FPS on medium/high settings and several post-processing effects. CPU usage is around 30%.

GTA V on the other hand, uses nearly all 2GB of my VRAM (actually hovers around 1850 MB), CPU usage often exceeds 60%. Average frame rate: 50-55 FPS, frequently reaching the sweet 60 FPS. I would call TW3 "unoptimised" - it's not maximising usage of available resources. A really well-optimised game would max out the GPU and CPU, and still run well and not lag.

 

Barring some weird thing that keeps me from going full screen at times....

With foliage density dialed down to high, using hardware cursor, and disabling nvidia hair thingy, I get around 90fps everything else maxed. It seems fluid now too, no more stuttery mess. But after relaunching the game, It defaulted to borderless window and it refused to change.

 

I haven´t seen this tip before. To make the game start in full screen by default open user.settings and change FullScreenMode= 1 to 2 (I haven´t tested myself).

 

None of these are necessarily true. Maxing out resources that aren't needed isn't optimized; it's wasteful. Waste is an opposite of optimal. Just because the game doesn't use everything available to it does not automatically mean that it isn't optimized or that it's poorly optimized.

Rather, I think that you should look at it this way: the game is running at 35-40 FPS with medium/high settings and it's using only 800MB vRAM and 30% of the CPU to do it. I call that some very impressive optimization but it suggests that there is a choke point somewhere. I suspect it is your GPU, possibly the drivers (Nvidia's last few drivers have been problematic for overclockers), but I don't have information about either driver code or CDPR's code to say that with any certainty.

Comparisons to GTA V are specious. It's a different game with a different engine with different requirements.

 

It uses less than 2000MB of VRAM for me on Ultra. Usually between 1500MB and 1800MB.

 

NotebookCheck did their usual benchmark tests on a bunch of notebook GPUs (and few desktop GPUs for comparison):



http://www.notebookcheck.com/The-Witcher-3-Notebook-Benchmarks.142824.0.html

It really is 2nd gen Maxwell game: GTX 980M and 970M fare pretty well, they are up there with high-end desktop AMD GPUs (GTX 970M beats R9 280X on all settings, GTX 980M beats R9 290X on ultra, hello HairWorks ).

On my GTX 970M I get ~45-60 fps with GeForce experience recommended settings (mix of ultra and high, HBAO+ on, HairWorks off) or ~30 fps with hand tuned mostly ultra settings (HairWorks on, HBAO+ on) or ~40-50 fps with the same settings but HairWorks off.

 

Those numbers are invalid as of the latest Witcher 3 update. Performance increased by a good 15%~ with hairworks & 352.86.

 

How could the 850M be outperforming the 860M? Something is off there. Anyway, I'm happy with the performance of my 860m (+250/+350).

 

So no matter what I currently do, the game defaults to borderless window. I have tried many things so far but nothing works. Borderless windows looks very stuttery compared to full screen, not to mention it runs at lower average fps.

EDIT: Had to reinstall the video drivers, now full screen works.

What do you guys suggest is the better approach?

Lower Foliage to high, disabling nvidia hair, and playing between 80-96fps (Those fps I got from the tutorial section).

Or, enable 60fps limit, still vsync on, keep foliage to ultra and play 60fps? (based only on tutorial).

As a note, my monitor runs currently at 96hz. Which is why it caps at 96hz.

Maybe I could even disable something else, to ensure continous 96fps?

 

According to TechSpot, Witcher 3 is "the new Crysis". However, I don't ever recall Crysis getting downgraded before release.

But Can it Run Witcher 3™ indeed. I believe I called it a while back.

 

it just barely beats the R9 280X....though with an overclock i think it would do better.

 

Need dat hairfx doe...

 

You have weird fetishes

 

ManuelG said:We discovered a couple of issues in regards to Kepler GPUs and are working on driver updates.


Finally. Thanks for taking feedback into consideration.

THERE IS HOPE THAT KEPLER ISNT DEAD

 

they better effing fix it soon cos they're gonna be killing their own userbase.

 

Geralt playing a game of tethercorpse

 

Hi ppl, obviously couldn't read through 64 pages here, so quickly asking:
Is there a way of tweaking the user.settings or anything else to gain the particle effects show in the trailers etc? Talking about the many leafs blowing through the wind, groups of birds in the sky, fire particles bouncing off the enemy when casting igni, ...

For the rest, I'll post my performance results of the game so far:
So my laptop specs:
i7-4710hq
16GB Ram
980M 4GB
(no overclocking, default clocks)

Witcher 3 results:
So I have set almost everything to high/on except for: (a few useless settings to medium or low, such as Detail level and maximum character count)
Texture quality: Ultra
Terrain Quality: Ultra
Motionblur: off
Nvidia hairworks: off
Ambiant occlusion: HBAO+
VSync: off

I'm getting around 55 fps
of course there are times where it dips to 48, and when it surpasses 60. But visually quite appealing, but Like stated above, I'm missing the particle effects as I REALLY like those

 

The next patch is supposed to expose more settings through INI file editing.

 

Just got back from a short postgraduate conference/trip to Northern Ireland (fell in love with the Emerald Isle, didn't want to leave!).

I'm dismayed to see an extortionate price of £50 for The Witcher 3. I respect CD Projekt RED but that's far more costly than the console versions. You know a PC game is far too overpriced when the console versions are significantly cheaper.

Any tips on where I can grab a Steam key for a fair price?

EDIT: nevermind, I've bought it from GMG which had a much fairer price of £36.50 (crucially cheaper than console versions). Sucks that I only get a GOG key but hey, at least it's DRM free.

 

Leaving Hairworks off (completely useless) and keeping resolution the same @ 1080p, I see barely a 10 FPS difference between low and ultra settings. On GTA V, there's a massive difference between having the sliders on the extreme "low" side and on the extreme "ultra" side (at the same resolution). With everything on the lowest setting, the game looks crappy but I can hit 100+ FPS in GTA. On Ultra, everything goes down to 30 FPS or so, but still playable.

On TW3, the only setting that honestly makes any real difference to the frame rate is the resolution slider. Turn it down to 900p, and I get a 5 FPS increase. 768p: I can easily hit 50-60 FPS on high settings. But it looks extremely aliased. This was all in Velen, which I found to be extremely taxing on the GPU. I would expect texture quality to have a significant impact on performance, but not with TW3. That's very strange.

Yes, everyone's going to say "it's not a fair comparison, GTA V uses a different renderer and works differently", but surprise, surprise, I shouldn't care about the inner workings. If I get lower performance and lower visual fidelity in a game that was released at approximately the same time as another, I am going to make comparisons, fair or not, because REDengine isn't being efficient when Rockstar's engine is.

For goodness' sake, CDPR, I don't want to run a benchmark on my system, I just want to play a game.

Is there any way to feedback to them directly on this?

 

Its like you said cause they had in mind consoles.Consoles run on med-high.Hairworks,shadows,foliage distance and HBAO have impact on performance all other you can set on ultra and you wont loss more than 1-2fps for them.Btw guys i tryied 350.12,352.26 and 347.88 drivers and they all give me 99% usage of gpu.I wonder if its driver fault for low kepler performance cause they already use my gpu 99?or its cdpr optimization for kepler?In other words will I gain fps by that announced kepler fix driver which comes soon if i already have 99% gpu usage?

 

i hope they release that driver soon.

 

Even people with a desktop 680 can't maintain 60 FPS at 1080p with all settings as low as they go. They have to drop resolution in order to achieve that.

Texture quality usually has no impact on performance, only on VRAM usage. But yeah, I agree that the game is not scalable. It was the same story with Witcher 2. Minimum requirements are very high because most of the graphics settings have little to no impact on performance, just visuals. You can make the game look like Witcher 1 yet it still takes a decently powerful PC to run. And then there are one or two settings that absolutely rape frame rate. Ubersampling in TW2, HairWorks and Foliage Visibility Range in TW3.

Speaking of which, maybe CDPR will enable Ubersampling in TW3 when Pascal releases. You know, futureproofing the game and all.

 

Im amazed this game even boots on my pc ubisoft should feel ashamed because watchdogs, unity, and fc4 were sliders and ac unity didnt even bother booting. This is hands down the best looking multi plat game of the year so far despite the mediocre optimization. Im kinda hoping they can fix some of the performance optimization with patches but dont hold your breath people. All I really need now is lower resolution options : 1080x720 and 1162x648 and even 480p are supremely missed. Those give me the best 16:9 ratio on my wide screens and maintain steady fps. 1162x648 has been the best for my older laptop displaying newer games 2014 and up externally on a widescreen via hdmi. Rise gtaV and mgsV run butter smooth at that res while still looking hd like.

cdpr please add lower resolutions pal !

 

How does performance on average compare to the FPS experienced at the very start of the game; looking out of that balcony onto the mountain valley?

Just curious.

 

^^^Woah, that's a pretty big chicken.

 

This is a silly question.
Does anyone know where the Crookbag Bog is?

 

Anyone tried the E3FX-mod Gopher talks about in the beginning? It looks very good imo:



Edit: Nvidia is supposedly working on a fix for Kepler:
https://forums.geforce.com/default/...he-witcher-3-wild-hunt-/post/4537394/#4537394

 

It's a 'roided up KFC chicken

 

Glad to see they are quickly updating this game so far, 1.04 just downloaded with a list of fixes/improvements.

Having fun with it, so far no crashes or issues.

 

isnt it blurry for you?i tryied lowering to 900p and i feel a bit the blurry and when i tryied 768p it looked horrible

 

He's probably used to it by now heh heh