Witcher 2 GPU benchmarks

Nvidia: GT 555M/GTX 260M

AMD: 6750M/6770M

Everything less is below the minimum GPU requirement, and will falter greatly. Overclock the above, and you have a decent shot.

 

Phew, I just barely made that line, eh? Thank god for my 460M lol

Mr. Mysterious

 

Barely? Not really. I mean, the GTX 460M is like 45% faster than the 260M, so you have way more headroom with which to play.

edit from above: I really think that the GTX 460M and 5870M are the minimum to have a decent mix of settings and framerate.

 

That's just stupid lol...both are Tier 1 Graphics cards...

I guess it's smart of the devs to set the settings so high, because newer cards are going to come out in the future.

But it's stupid because they're not going to find a market in anyplace except for the performance enthusiasts. They've pretty much said "sorry" to about 75% of the laptop gaming population.

Mr. Mysterious

 

Can anyone link me to where I can get the demo?

 

And you're getting ~40-45 FPS with that?

 

Yes, but Medium includes a couple of Post Processing effects, and as PP loves performance stealing, if I disable, I might get a shot with only textures maxed and rest total low at 1080p... Not sure though, But you are kinda exaggerating that my 5730 is 50% worse. It's 50% worse compared to the 5870, but compared to the GTX260M, it's only 10-20%. I OC though, to 715/870.

BTW, kinda offtopic, would I see a boost going from 870MHz to 880MHz? I would like to keep at least 20 MHz of headroom between the clocks and 900, because at 900 I artifact.

 

There would be a boost, but it would not be noticeable.

Mr. Mysterious

 

Thx for the answer. As i figured out the biggest by far performance boost is CPU Throttlestop -- i tried with and without it -- steady 10-15 fps increase right there.

The problem is however that my notebook shuts down after playing for 15 minutes. I guess cooling is not ok.... any ideas how can i fix it? Maybe slow cpu down a bit..

 

I'd say you should try undervolting. Worst comes to worst, get a cooler or prop the back of your laptop open.

Macbooks really aren't made for gaming =/

Mr. Mysterious

 

What have you done with Throttlestop?

What did you enable/disable?

 

Thats what i did

 

I totally forgot about Throttlestop -face palm-. I just overclocked my quad core Q9000 from 2GHZ to 2.4GHZ, MASSIVE improvement to the FPS. Overclocked the GTX260m as well to 660 on the core. Texture on high with disabled downscale texture, light shaft on high while everything else on medium/off on 720p; fps average at high 20s to low 30s with jumps to 40, along with dips to mid 20s during intense scenes.

 

can anyone help me how to boost my cpu but make it so it doesnt shut down the notebook in the process?

 

Notebookcheck's tier system is flat out broken. Tier 1 (or Class 1) is now the GTX 460M and up. Even the GT 555M and 6770M shouldn't be up there, as they are really at the top of the Class 2 list. In my opinion, it's time to start rating mobile GPUs in relation to their +/- of the 8800/9800 GT.

And what can devs do anymore? The 8800 GT is a 4 year old card, and is now considered the bare minimum. To aim for even weaker cards would make the top-end suffer. Developers eventually have to leave people behind.

The truth is, "mid-range" mobile GPUs (128-bit DDR3) are actually in the lowest tier possible.

As far as resolutions, you will not find a playable average @ 1080p, regardless of settings.

And no, the 5730 is not within 10-20% of the GTX 260M, even when overclocked. If it was that close, we'd be having a totally different discussion as to what settings you can handle. The 260M itself is 50% slower than the 5870M. But that's a discussion for a different thread, I think.

 

But...there's not much above the 460M At least not right now.

In a year, we should see more and more cards.

Mr. Mysterious

 

WOOW 17 multiplier?! When I put it to Turbo, it only stays in 12-13...

Also, you increased your FSB, right? Because I have 133MHz, and you have 143Mhz...

 

Cool a game I can't play


Time to look at making a desktop

 

Lieto is that a different laptop you're boosting? Never heard of throttlestop before this thread tbh.

 

*ahem*

http://forum.notebookreview.com/hardware-components-aftermarket-upgrades/531329-throttlestop-guide.html

Mr. Mysterious

 

I just tried having the same settings. I never got 17x multiplier. EVER.

wat do?

 

Could i oc my i7 740 with this throttlestop?

 

So, to anyone who has 5850m, on what setting are you playing this game?

 

I just use the "auto-detect" settings for my desktop, it looks good and I get 45-60fps, gameplay feels really smooth so I'm happy.

 

Well, you have a 5730, like me! Could you please test with everything disabled and low EXCEPT "Texture Memory" on Very Large and Decals on Med Spec in 1080p please?

I appreciate it a lot!

 

It will take a while coz I haven't installed the game on my notebook yet... oh and the res on my notebook is only 1366x768 lol.

Using this screenshot I took as my wallpaper now.

 

Mmmm, it's a nice wallpaper!

By the way, after using those settings, can you also do the same, but enable Light Shafts, on 1080p

 

FYI, Texture Memory Size has nothing to do with texture quality. And you don't want that on Very Large, with less than 2GB of video RAM.

Here's the entire readme section on graphics settings:

5) Advanced Configuration Options

-Texture downscaling: higher values result in lower texture quality.

-Texture memory size: sets the amount of graphics card memory allocated to textures. Larger values will decrease the amount of streaming that occurs in game and will make the game run more smoothly, but they can also cause the graphics card to run out of memory and even result in game crashes. Choose a reasonable value based on the amount of memory available on your graphics card.

- Shadow quality: affects graphics performance. Consumes GPU power without affecting CPU performance.

- Number of shadowed lights: set the maximum number of lights that cast shadows. Affects graphics performance. Consumes GPU power without affecting CPU performance.

- LOD distance: distance scale for level of detail on meshes. Lower values improve game performance but result in reduced detail on models.

- Bloom: effect greatly improves quality of game graphics without placing excess demands on GPU.

- Light shafts: visual effect recommended for medium-high/high-end machines. Should be disabled on older systems.

- Anti-aliasing: demanding effect that can significantly reduce performance, so it should be disabled on medium and low-end machines.

- Blur effects: special blur and radial blur visual effects that are quite demanding on hardware but used rarely in the game.

- Depth of field – gameplay: subtle visual effect. Option determines appearance of effect only during gameplay sequences and does not affect DoF in cutscenes.

- Vignette: aesthetic option that produces a photographic vignette around the game screen. Does not affect performance.

- Rain, Wet surfaces rain effect: modest impact on performance.

- SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion): lighting effect that is important to the game but unfortunately places significant demands on the GPU.

- Motion blur: blur effect on camera movement, demanding on the GPU.

- Cinematic depth of field: provides movie-like depth of field in cutscenes and dialogue sequences. Extremely detailed but demands significant power. Should only be enabled on machines equipped with top-end graphics cards.

- Depth of field – cutscenes: option only affects cutscenes and dialogue sequences, does not affect gameplay performance.

- Dangling objects limit: limiter for physical animation of character components like Geralt's hair. Disabling this option places greater demands on the CPU.

- Ubersampling: high quality rendering mode under which whole scenes are rendered multiple times to provide the best possible textures, object details and anti-aliasing (superior to anti-alias and anisotropy even on the highest settings). Use with caution, only on top-end computers (best possible in terms of both GPU and CPU).

- Vertical sync: helps eliminate "screen tearing" ( Screen tearing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) during camera movements and blinking on very quick animations (e.g., bright explosions), but can cause somewhat slower rendering and short input lags.

- Decals: enabling decals like dust or blood on characters can affect CPU performance.

 

any g51jx/gts 360m users care to share how it runs?

 

At this rate, virtually all of the posters here will be installing the game on their power desktop configurations to get the game to really run at its graphical maximum.

Looking at the advanced graphical options explanation, it seems a couple of options only affect the CPU with the GPU taking most of the processing duties. If the developers repeated their trick with the Trade Quarter in W1 Chapter 3, then a powerful quad-core may well be on the cards as well.

 

It's not going to run pretty. My Q9000+GTX260m manages medium/off/720p@30+fps.

 

Cool beans. Guess I'll pass on this game then.

 

thanks kevin for that info. Good to see, I can turn up CPU stuff for sure but will definitely take a look at GPU stuff to turn down if I want to play on my native laptop screen rather than hdtv.

 

That's actually my screenshot that he posted up. The only reason it says 17x multiplier is because (as you'll see below that) ONE of the cores has a multiplier of 17x, one has 11x, etc.

 

Thank you Kevin

So the used texture VRAM is this : Very Large = 1.5-2GB; Large = 1GB; Medium = 512-768MB; Low = 512MB?

Also, does deacreasing that setting reduce the texture quality?

 

Read the description carefully. A larger VRAM buffer lets the GPU have more on its plate to process faster, but setting the plate size larger than what it is physically able to handle will cause the system to crash. In other words, texture quality is independent of the texture memory size.

You'll probably have to look up the official forums to see what scales the programmers put in.

 

So, outside of the benchmarks, what are peoples' opinions of the game?

Mr. Mysterious

 

Metacritic so far has overwhelmingly positive responses from the critics and a vast majority of users rating the game highly. Any negative comments so far seem to stem from too much hype, an abandonment of the RPG-concept in favour of action adventure and excessively high system requirements (lol).

 

Lol, thank you very much harley...

I was actually wondering about the humble average gamer's opinion, a person who visits NBR very often

Mr. Mysterious

 

I can't touch the game until mid-October at the earliest, but everyone else who's reported their performance is probably still feeling their way through the prologue and Chapter 1. They're probably having a lot of fun as well hence the lack of responses from the "humble average gamers" not put off by the extreme requirements.

 

Well someone could buy it for you and ship it? That would only take a couple of days...

Got any friends in the States?

Mr. Mysterious

 

It's not just the game purchase, the system needed to actually run the game is still in production and I won't get my hands on that until October. I could ask a relative to try it on her machine but that's equipped with a 5730 which won't go much further past medium settings.

 

Ohhh, that sucks. Sorry to hear that =/

Mr. Mysterious

 

I was thinking of opening another thread about it Mr. M, but I'll play...

The game is amazing, but there is a level of frustration associated with playing it that knocks it back from a 10 to an 8.0-8.5.

Silly things, not being able to remap keys in a simple fashion (found work around), my quick touch volume doesn't work with this game for some reason, inventory management is a pain, and tutorials are more of a flash in the pan when they exist. I can't b**ch about the graphics because my rig is 3 years old, and I found settings I can live with and the game still looks better than almost any I've played.

Things I like:

- Dialogue, in almost all cases, frickin great with realistic accents; and the language used just seems to fit the atmosphere! The fact that Geralt and Triss have American accents doesn't bother me because I played the first game and got used to it.

- Choices; this part will have me playing moe than a couple of times because I have been torn about which way to go, and I'm only just now hit the 2nd act.

- Atmosphere; I just left Flotsam and the town and people were portrayed to make you feel what it was- a poverty stricken hobble with people who's lives are in turmoil, with a unscrupulous constable who could give a 5hit less.

- Combat encounters; lots of people will have differing feelings on this, but I think it's great that in most cases you can't flick your sword and walk out a winner on the other side. You have to have patience and anticipate as if you expect to get your butt kicked , or it will happen just that much more. I may not necessarily have to, but I am using bombs and traps that I never gave a thought to in first game (Although another dislike is how they have you play out the fight with the big baddy towards end of act 1...it's hard enough as it is, and they trow in little cut scenes and don't let you get oriented very well during the fight).

- While I don't really like some of the new things like the potion implementation, I like upgrading armor and more weapon variety. I'm not Jonesin for the next big thing ala Diablo, but it's a nice subtle change that enhances the game.

- This goes with choices and dialogue, but the story is great so far as well. Obviously can't get into it for spoiler reasons, but it is done better than first one, and I thought that story was done pretty well.

Probably forgot some good and bads, but that's a start. Off to play some more.

 

I love getting pwned by weak a** nekkers. D;
The game runs great on my notebook, and to be able to turn off useless motion blur and such is a added bonus to a game like this.
Also read that all the DLC will be free, but we probably have to pay for expansion packs.

 

Pretty much agree down the line. I'm just finishing up a little side quest business in act 1 myself before I move on. My hardware volume also does not work in game. I agree that the inventory system is not well done. Its not horrid but I've seen better. The in game tutorial would not have bothered me as it was adequate to get you rolling but I believe the tutorial section of the journal should have been better fleshed out with details. By way of for instance it took me a couple tries before I figured out what I was supposed to do in arm wrestling. The tutorial says to work the bar over to the right but does not tell you HOW to do that. I'm also liking the combat much better than in W1. In the first game I was able to simply sponge the damage and click on time to get through nearly any encounter without even bothering to block. In W2 losing the weak timing mechanism finds me more in the fight and these have a much more natural feel as you watch to parry and strike, roll out of danger, move to a more advantageous position from which to strike and so on. Failing to learn how to block in this game means seeing a loading screen on the normal difficulty when you get to where you face multiple opponents from all sides which is already happening in act 1. I would recommend selecting the witcher skill to parry 360 degrees to anyone starting the game, I think you pretty much need it. I have also found its a good idea to keep pockets stocked with bombs and traps as the game will occasionally have you getting jumped unforeseen and its too late then.

As to rating the game its a wee bit early for me. I think we have all played games that started out great but went downhill. If I had to rate what I played so far I would go with a 9. For me to get a 10 you must be perfect. I have never rated a game a 10. The issues with this one however are small and essentially do not effect game play itself which I am enjoying a great deal. If the level of play holds up to the end I believe this is without question game of the year material.

 

I still cant get used to combat system.
Lets say 3-4 guards are closing to you — you attack one and your hero starts PUSHING their line so you are automatically surrounded and dead. I assume you need to hit those side mobs that try to surround you to push them back and thats just feels a bit weird.

I played the game for like an hour since i still trying to figure out how to run it with decent settings. Also i am not really fond of those "sneaky quests" where you need to go silently — i just agroed the guard and failed the quest of getting some mechanism part from the garden ><

Game looks a bit weird if you set everything to low, its just not smooth and hurting the eye.

Also movement — its so awkward when you run through opened door and Geralt suddenly switch from run to walk... then you turn backwards and it decide to pass through that door again. Its awkward when you get surrounded in combat — you want to turn back fast and its just not fast.

Also potions yes. Also i miss "pause" key

 

Took me about 3 hours of failing in the prologue to figure things out, but once you get past the hump its a lot of fun. You have to be tactical and prepare for battles, not like DA2 where I could just leave my guys to do whatever on hard settings and come out unscathed.

I have lowered the resolution; Nvidia finally fixed their scaling, so I am playing at 1680x1050 with the black bars but it still looks great. Everything maxed and on except for: ubersampling, SSAO and motion blur and it runs at 30-60 FPS never dropping below 30. Looks like im getting another GTX 460 Might I add my core is at 875 from 715 and my memory is at 1900(3.8ghz).

 

Concerning the Witcher 2, When installing the game, I couldn't enter my activation code and when using the video options screen, buttons, i.e. ok, auto-detect,input settings, etc. would be overlapping each other.

Come to find out these issues persist if you don't have your DPI set to default.

Anyone else find this strange ?

 

Free DLC, No free expansions = Better than any other company out there!

Horse armor anyone ?