PC performance thread

[MicoSelva]

Because we clearly need one of these.

[GPU]

Nvidia's performance and tweaking guide.

Note: Radeons work surprisingly well in this game.

Most taxing settings are:
- hairworks
- foliage visibility range (especially ultra level)
- anti-aliasing
- ambient occlusion (especially HBAO+)
- shadow quality

You can pretty much crank everything else to Ultra without losing performance. Although you might need to set lower texture quality if you have a card with less than 2 GB of VRAM, but that needs verification. (Anyone?)

The game's visual quality does not improve very much between different setting levels. Yes, ultra looks better than low, but not that much better.

Wild Hunt needs a GTX 970 or 980 to keep constant 60+ FPS, so if you dislike FPS count jumping all over the place (like I do) and do not use VSYNC, you might want to set limit to 30 - if you have a decent PC, that should mean constant, rock solid 30 (works on my GTX 680). With VSYNC, the FPS limit is pretty pointless.

EDIT:

[CPU]

As for the CPU, you are fine with pretty much any quad core (or better). Two core CPUs with hyper-threading are doing a decent job too. With two cores (or one) you are out of luck, with heavily overclocked G3258 being the exception (thanks, Raghar).

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I also have a question - has anybody tried running this game on a GeForce 650 Ti (1GB version), and if so, how does it do? I need to know before I spend the dough to buy a birthday gift that might turn out useless. This chart does not promise much, though.

 

[Starwars]

I will soon try to melt my old GTS450 with this game and see what happens.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Performance_Analysis/The_Witcher_3/3.html

Witcher 3 VRAM usage:

Wow. That's how an efficient texture streaming engine looks like. Potato Effizienz.

 

[Roguey]

I was p. shocked yesterday when I noticed for the first time that my card doesn't meet the minimum, but then I saw videos of someone playing it with my card on the low settings with 30-40+ fps so it's fine.

 

[Cnaiur]

I know how the Codex values - never publicly though, I know - realistic hair movement, so here's how you reduce the FPS hit by enabling Hairworks. Apparently it comes with 8x MSAA on default.

For Nvidia users.

• Hairworks is automatically set to 8msaa, this is probably why a 980 and even a Titan get ridiculous fps dips.
  
  
• Go to your game install folder
  
  
• Find Bin>Config>Base>Rendering.ini
  
  
• Change it to 4,2 or 0. Zero is a bit too jaggy and 2 is perfect Fps when in White Orchard Village in the Griffon trophy went from 40-45 to 55-60
  
  
• if 2aa is still jaggy, go to Nvidia control app and force FXAA.
  
  
• Bin>Config>Base>visuals.ini
  
  
• Uber is automatically on during cutscenes and fps is locked to 30 just change it to whatever.

 

[Markman]

I'm getting about 50-60 fps with alot of stuff on high/ultra at 1080p. I got i7, 16gb ram and 780.
I did turn off hair bullshit, motion blur and some other shit.

 

[Ulminati]

I was p. shocked yesterday when I noticed for the first time that my card doesn't meet the minimum, but then I saw videos of someone playing it with my card on the low settings with 30-40+ fps so it's fine.

That's because minimum requirements were given before CDPR downgraded optimized everything.

 

[Raghar]

You can play on G3258 overclocked to reasonable levels. So dual cores are definitely playable.

 

[Starwars]

So I tried it very briefly on my old GTS450, I-3 540@3.07ghz, 8192MB RAM.

If I turned off everything, turned everything to low and brought down the resolution to 1600x900, it ran OK though with stuttering at times. If I were *very* inclined to play the game it'd work but didn't really feel worth it to me personally. Plus, you can see from the opening bits of the game how much it relies on its graphics-whoredom. It obviously wants you to awe you, it's *designed* to awe you, and when you play at such low settings it just becomes more laughable than anything else. And everything looks shit of course, waaaay worse than how Witcher 2 looked on the same rig because... well, it's obviously not "meant" to be run at such low settings.
I've mostly liked the Witcher games based on their atmosphere and setting, so this will be a game I'll play through whenever I get a new rig that can run it somewhat decently. I don't care enough about the gameplay and story as is.

Was fun to try though.

 

[Kane]

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Performance_Analysis/The_Witcher_3/3.html

Witcher 3 VRAM usage:

Wow. That's how an efficient texture streaming engine looks like. Potato Effizienz.

It's nice. Not thrilling. But nice.

 

[muds_animal_friend]

I'm playing on a 7970m, which is basically a slower 7870, and so below minimum specs (or perhaps not thanks to the magic of console downgrade). I ramped everything up to ultra and started turning things down (and back up again) until I hit a point where 30 FPS @ 1080 was the low performance threshold. I can run most of the settings at ultra, and 30fps is fine for this game. It isn't a shooter.


Graphics

Shadow Quality, Terrain Quality, Water Quality, Grass Density, Texture Quality, and Detail Level: Ultra didn't lower performance below 30fps.
NVidia HairWorks: http://wccftech.com/witcher-3-run-hairworks-amd-gpus-crippling-performance/
Number Of Background Characters: Can't comment as I haven't reach the big cities yet. I've left it a ultra for now.
Foliage Visibility Range: Kills my FPS stone dead. Had to set it to low.


Post Processing

I turned almost everything off. Not for performance reasons so much as I find the effects utter shit. Of those I did try:

Anti-aliasing: I set up a game profile and let my card handle this directly. Big performance increase for me. Not sure how CDPR is handling AA.
Bloom: No noticeable performance hit.
Light Shafts: No noticeable performance hit.

 

[Sensuki]

Looks like it looks worse than The Witcher 2? lol

 

[racofer]

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Performance_Analysis/The_Witcher_3/3.html

Witcher 3 VRAM usage:

Wow. That's how an efficient texture streaming engine looks like. Potato Effizienz.

That explains the blurriness: low res textures all over the place.

 

[Perkel]

i53470@3.2Ghz + HD7970 i locked it at 1600x900@60fps with mix of med to ultra. Shadows on med rest of high with few to ultra. Occasionally there are places where it can dip below 60.

Looks like it looks worse than The Witcher 2? lol

It looks way better than TW2.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Obligatory Low vs Ultra comparison:

 

[tyrannosaurus rex]

The video's quality is broken. Shove that up your ass.

 

[Mortmal]

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Performance_Analysis/The_Witcher_3/3.html

Witcher 3 VRAM usage:

Wow. That's how an efficient texture streaming engine looks like. Potato Effizienz.

so little memory used even at 4K resolution but Crispy advise 4 giga ram video cards now , why ?

 

[King Crispy]

Nigger, please. Witcher 3 got severely castrated and you know it.

4GB GPU's are a no-brainer.

 

[Metro]

For 1080 it's going to be another year or two before 4GB are actually useful for more than one or two games.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Nigger, please. Witcher 3 got severely castrated and you know it.

4GB GPU's are a no-brainer.

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

~25% are 2GB VRAM users versus ~6% are 4GB users. Growth rate of 2GB users is currently twice as high.

Seems like 2GB minimum is gonna stick around with us for quite some while.

 

[MicoSelva]

Regarding alleged crippling of Kepler cards' performance in the newest Nvidia drivers:

http://pclab.pl/art63116-44.html

Turns out they just suck in this game.

EDIT:

And as for the newest patch improving performance...

http://pclab.pl/art63116-43.html

 

[Irxy]

i5-2400 3.3ghz / 16gb / 780 / ssd
All ultra except for foliage and shadows which are high (also turned off annoying motion blur, vignetting and chromatic aberration).
55-60 fps with hairworks off, 40-50 with full hairworks (patch 1.03).

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Guise, don't use this hairworks crap. It's a pointless framerate sink and an evil Nvidia scheme to sell you $1000 cards.

 

[Ulminati]

I'm using hairwerx, everything on ultra, tweaked inis to enable ubersampling and bump decals up a bit more, vignette/motion blur/DoF off and SweetFX shaders on top. Getting 47fps outdoors, 52 fps indoors. Hairwerx off only gives an additional 2-3 FPS after I changed hair MSAA from x8 to x4

GTX 970, Core I7 3770, 16GB RAM

 

[VentilatorOfDoom]

Show me the difference between SweetFX shaders and normal pl0x.