Witcher 3- Playing now excellent optimization

The game unlocked for me and i'm playing with a 7850 with mostly medium settings ( AA off , blur off, and textures and detail level at high ) and i'm sitting between 40-45fps. So as expected the minimum requirements are way to generouns ( and is expected considering it can ran on Xbox 1 which has an underclocked 7790 )

Granted i'm still in the beginning and havent visited a city or anything but first impressions are great

Using an overclocked 7850 ( 1ghz gpu clock ) paired with an i5 4440 and 8gb ram

well everything i got in ultra expect of hair , and hbo+ for now using 1 gpu and its steady 60 fps , I M in LOVE with GAME OMG !

Cant wait for crossfire profile so i can turn on hbo+ and the hair as i its 60 fps as ARF compatible profile , but with all the flickers its really unplayable :) .

good to hear your 7850 can run it ok, hopefully I get a little boost with x2 7850s.

Running good for me to, 45 fps I have been getting with most on high with a i5 and 660 ti (nvidia hair off, Tesselation at medium, Water on Medium). Windows 7, 8gb ram and todays witcher 3 gpu driver. Was expecting some low and most medium from the requirements, but very impressed so far after the first few hours and stoked when it set up my setting to mostly all high and some on medium.

The controls border on unplayable, graphics wont fix that.

I think you mean a joypad? No. I bought it for the pc, it was a pc franchise, it was advertized as having mouse and keyboard controls.

No "well just", no.

the game plays better with a controller... just like witcher 2 did. i promise.

AMD Radeon7950 boost / fx 8350 / 8Gig of RAM here!

Everything maxed, 1080p , locked at 60 fps with v-sync!

The game is amazingly optimized :) !

How are the CPU core usage on the 8350? All three posters with FX-8350 CPUs seem fine and dandy with TW3.

I have one too. But, most game experiences I have seemed to mirror earlier model i5 CPUs.

according to this witcher 3 is good at multithreading and not that taxing at cpu as long as you have a decent quad core or a modern i3 and above

How are the CPU core usage on the 8350?

Cool. I've been on a roll lately with open-world games (FC3, FC4, GTA V). I might add TW3 to my list.

Anyone here tried it on a single 970? I'm still debating with myself whether to get it or not.

Yep, runs on Ultra at 1080 70+ fps without Hairworks, now with Hairworks, knocking down shadows to high and foliage distance to high and using SSAO allows to run 50+ fps.

Going to play more with the settings, Ive read that hairwork's applies 8xAA to the objects that use it so im going to lower it to 2x and see if it helps.

How are you getting such good performance? I haven't seen any benches showing that level yet on a 970 - would you mind posting details on hardware and settings in this thread for record/comparison?

@xantufrog:

Here is a benchmark done with GTX 970

My i5 2500k and GTX 680 can max out gta, on this game it struggles with just high settings. Framerate is all over the place and gameplay mechanics seem clunky (with 360 controller). I'll try with lower settings and report back.

That's interesting. I get a solid 10+ FPS better with my Phenom II, but that's with hairworks off (I'm assuming theirs is on?). Surprising that the CPU makes such a huge difference

remember, high was the old ultra settings , they alternated the settings right before release with that patch.

What gpu are you using?

But playing around the rendering config file, Ive changed the hairworks pre-applied AA method of 8x to 0, and this has allowed me to almost get a average 60 fps with hairworks using Ultra setting with high foliage distance, high shadows and using SSAO. In forests and dense areas it will dip into lower to mid 50's.

Zotac GTX970 (base model). I'll probably play around with tweaks like this later and see where that gets me!

Yeah, its a good thing that this game is well coded using multithreading efficiently , because normally that Phenom 2 would hold back that 970 quite abit to the point of halving its performance potential.

The Witcher 2 worked better with a mouse and keyboard, espcailly with menus. Even the basic act of "turning" is botched in the Witcher 3.

It's frankly, a travesty of the pc, graphics is the least of it's problems.

what? the witcher 3 is one of the best games to come out in years..... and is probably the single best open world game ever created.

have been playing for a dozen hours with a controller and have had zero problems.... i cant imagine playing the game with mouse and keyboard considering there is no precision needed and moving the mouse constantly to pan the camera or whatever would just blow.

Game runs mostly 50-60fps with my 290x @1080p with everything on ultra except hairworks (the turning off hair AA trick just made Geralt's hair look like a blob of jaggies), although like in tomb raider, I think the default hair looks and reacts better anyways.

I get the around the same big drops in frame rate when gets super close up to Geralt's hair and that whether I am using AA 8 or 0 for hairworks so I just left mine at 8.

I turned hairworks off, i think it's a stupid gimmick by Nvidia to make people think they need to upgrade to maxwell architecture. Kills performance for no reason and for very little benefit. My 680 maxes out all other games so I'm good lol :)

Dropping Hairworks AA to 2X does give a noticeable boost in performance with minimal visual downgrade (at least at 1440p). I am leaving it at 2X.

@Jawad2007:

http://www.reddit.com/r/witcher/comments/36jpe9/how_to_run_hairworks_on_amd_cards_without/

Instructions for speeding up NVIDIA Hairworks on AMD GCN hardware. Apparently, it's another Crysis 2's "heavy tessellation on a flat wall" type politics.

Game actually plays decently on the GTX 580, some settings on medium/high at max. Apart from a few hiccups and stutters, it runs well on my end.

I just started playing TW3. Unlike many here, I'm perfectly fine with below 60 fps so long as my minimums are at least 30 fps. The framerates may seem low. But, the mouse doesn't feel "burdened" like some games from Ubisoft and Bethesda.

I can't remember my graphics settings because I'm still finding the right mix. But, most graphics settings are either High or Ultra with AA on and Hairworks off. I haven't played an RPG since the first Witcher. So, I'm on training wheels right now.

If I can maintain 30+ fps throughout the game at these settings, I'm happy.

Yeap tessellation is the name of the problem.

Nvidia's GPUs are more advanced in tesselation and gameworks use heavy tessellation. So Nvidia's GPUs will be faster in these scenarios.

And in Crysis 2, there weren't many heavy tessellation on flat walls.

It was in the underground water! :P

@Coseniath:

EA DICE is joining the fray against NVIDIA

The controls are not particularly stella especially the movement. I am surprised no-one mentioned the tank like movement the game has. When will they learn that people are not cars, we don't need additional space to turn.(Xbox One Controller)

@ronvalencia: It was sarcasm. :P

In case you didn't read it, the techreport did an article for the Crysis 2 tess and among the objects with too much tessellation, there was an underground tess water (Venice in Gotham xD). :P

Here is the article:

Crysis 2 tessellation: too much of a good thing? A major DirectX 11 upgrade raises some vexing questions

Controls are fantastic, feels way less floaty than witcher 2's combat. The weapons feel heavy to which is nice, makes the weaposn feel better imo. Playing with a xbox one contorller on PC and like it more than K+M personally for this game (usually only third person games).

Maybe it's just a "relative" thing, but I think the controls are pretty good. I mean, it's complex-ish. But very responsive. TW2 was bad on M&K IMO. TW3 is not. And I like having to think about combat... games like Skyrim where it's basically "pick your weapon or spell and click a lot" feel less engaging

lol this one of the most unoptimized games ever

I am forced to play at a peasant res(1080p) because CDPR couldn't optimize for shit.

GTA V looks 10x better and runs 3x as good

4k@50-60fps maxed out(high grass,no msaa) on a single card

How do I drop Hairworks to 2x instead of 8?

Go to game install folder, The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt\bin\config\base find render.ini and change the hairworksAA to 2

can any one in here help me out, im new to pc gaming and have just bought a Lenovo Y50-70 i5 4210h 2.9GH turbo 3.5GH with a GTX 860m grafik Card.

Will it run the witcher 3 in ok settings ? can anyone help me out ?

GTX 860M is based on desktop GTX 750 Ti

@04dcarraher: thanks! I would hate to turn it off completely. This should save me a few FPS

Controls fine on mouse and keyboard for me.

Same here, 23 hours in so far using M+k and i'm having no problems,it plays perfectly for me, not sure what everyone else is on about,never played one minute of any witcher game with a gamepad and i don't intend to.

UIninspired carrying on his CDPR hate campaign..........Those unplayable controls that me and many other k+m users are finding perfectly playable........you must just suck on M+K thats the only explanation. :P

But most likely i would say it's just your blind hatrred for this game and it's devs that is causing you to cry problems whether it's valid or not, it must kill you to see this game so highly rated

Turning shadows to High instead of Ultra will get you a decent fps boost as well. I honestly don't notice the difference during gameplay, but do see it in screenshot comparisons. I prefer the extra fps. With those added fps, you can then enable 16xAF in the Nvidia Control Panel. This will give you a nice image quality boost that you will notice during gameplay.

There isn't a *CFX* profile yet.

Single R9 290 gets the job done.

I'm able to run the game with SSAO instead of HBAO, (AA, Hairworks, Depth Of Field) turned off, everything else on Ultra.

I'm getting 33 fps- 40 fps @ 1440P.

@insane_metalist: No crossfire profile no game for me.

Although I'll be upgrading gpu soon to new amd series or a 980\970