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[Beerman462]

I've found my sweet spot for this game.

Post Processing

On except Chromatic Aberration and Sharpening. Using SSAO.

Graphics

Frames Per Second Unlimited(limited to 30fps with Riva Tuner)

Resolution: 1920x1080
Window Borderless
HairWorks Off
Background characters: High
Shadows High
Terrain Ultra
Water: High
Grass: Medium
Texture: Ultra
Foliage Vis: High
Detail: High

Getting a locked 30fps. I can count on one hand how many times it dipped below in one night.


i5 2400
7870XT

 

[Naedtrax]

After playing for hours the past few days, I'm still satisfied with the preset!

Damn that looks great, good job mate

 

[wanderjahr]

Many of us have GSync and the issue is happening. I suggest you read the main thread on CDPR's forum.

I read the thread. I can count on one hand how many people actually posted their settings to try and troubleshoot it themselves. There are resources out there for people to eliminate the problem. There will always be camera pan strobing though. I'm not sure if that's what some people are harping on. I watched the videos with stuttering, and I can recreated those issues myself, but I can also eliminate them. Capping fps to 30 and running in windowed-borderless eliminates all instances of stutter for me.

If strobing/judder are what people want to eliminate entirely from jerky camera pans (800 pixels per second are always going to look jerky), I'd suggest decreasing sensitivity for their controllers, or maybe there are some motion-blur settings in the .ini files that can be tinkered with.

So saying everybody has the problem is wrong. Though I do believe others have the problem, I also believe it's fixable.

 

[Cannon Goose]

Haven't had a crash in ~18 hours and now I've had two within 10 minutes after turning on Hairworks. After I turned it off everything was fine.

 

[IcyRhythms]

Likely been asked, but how many cores does Witcher 3 use?

 

[finalflame]

Likely been asked, but how many cores does Witcher 3 use?

I think Durante's PC Gamer article said it scales well up to 4.

 

[viveks86]

Damn this looks fantastic, how to I get this?

Damn that looks great, good job mate

Thanks guys!

http://pastebin.com/KGPDrrP7

Made a couple more with the same preset:

 

[Branson]

Two settings I find absolutely worthless in this game. Sharpness and CA. The fuck thinks that looks good?

 

[loganclaws]

I read the thread. I can count on one hand how many people actually posted their settings to try and troubleshoot it themselves. There are resources out there for people to eliminate the problem. There will always be camera pan strobing though. I'm not sure if that's what some people are harping on. I watched the videos with stuttering, and I can recreated those issues myself, but I can also eliminate them. Capping fps to 30 and running in windowed-borderless eliminates all instances of stutter for me.

If strobing/judder are what people want to eliminate entirely from jerky camera pans (800 pixels per second are always going to look jerky), I'd suggest decreasing sensitivity for their controllers, or maybe there are some motion-blur settings in the .ini files that can be tinkered with.

So saying everybody has the problem is wrong. Though I do believe others have the problem, I also believe it's fixable.

Lol what is exactly is the point of your post? Anyways...

 

[samar11]

So is hairworks worth the frame drop?

 

[loganclaws]

So is hairworks worth the frame drop?

It looks really good on beasts, I wish they would add an option to enable it on beasts but not Geralt. I think many people want this option.

 

[mm04]

I'm having a very good experience so far about 4 hours in. Very smooth around the 60fps average range with not many dips. Ultra settings for most things and HairWorks on at 1440p. AA off, grass density and foliage visibility range both set to high are the only compromises I've selected. I'm running an i5 4690K @ 4ghz, 16gb ram, 970 SLI using an Acer XB270HU with G-Sync. It's glorious. I'm not perceiving the judder others are. I couldn't be happier.

 

[Allnamestakenlol]

So is hairworks worth the frame drop?

Not IMO. Tbh, I don't really notice the difference, except on Geralt. I've got about 30hrs logged playing on a 4k monitor and on a 65" plasma, and I just don't see it. Looks great in screenshots, tho.

 

[tuxfool]

Two settings I find absolutely worthless in this game. Sharpness and CA. The fuck thinks that looks good?

The first one, I do. Downsampling from 1440p with VSR introduces blurriness. I compensate it with sharpening on low.

 

[tuxfool]

Thanks guys!

http://pastebin.com/KGPDrrP7

Made a couple more with the same preset:

That does look great. I don't know how it will work on Skellige as the lighting conditions (and general environment palette) the are quite a bit different to the other regions.

 

[Jimrpg]

Sorry for double post.

CPU won't benefit much more. Check out Durante's post on PC Gamer (http://www.pcgamer.com/durantes-witcher-3-analysis-the-alchemy-of-smoothness), where he shows that it scales well with multiple cores (up to 4), but anything past 2.2ghz doesn't help.

In terms of OCing your graphics card, it seems that the game crashes frequently when there's any instability with the GPU. Once again, Durante touches on this in his article.

TL;DR - over clocking CPU won't help you, and over clocking GPU will cause the game to crash.

Thanks for the reply!

As I was fiddling with the various settings it didn't look like the CPU was getting bottlenecked. Not only that but as a multi platform game, the CPU is significantly weaker on the consoles so it probably makes sense that it only needs 2.2ghz.

 

[Starbuck2907]

Any idea how my PC would perform? i5-3570K @ 3.4 Ghz, Vapor-X HD 7970 GHz OC 3GB, 8 GB ram.

I'm running a 2500k @ 4ghz, 8 gigs of ram, and a factory overclocked 270X 2gn.

I can put almost everything in ultra except hair (usually turn it off) and shadows (medium).

I get about 30 fps. Very playable.

I'm thinking about tweaking things more to get the framerate up.

Maybe this gives you a basis for comparison?

 

[Jimrpg]

Ok I've read Durante's article now.

What about for people with G-Sync? I normally play full screen and don't use a frame limiter. From what I played last night at 60-70fps it was pretty smooth.

 

[DeathGlobe]

how demanding is downsampling I am just curious if its noticeable and better to go one setting up from 1080. I have 970 16gb of ram and i5 3570k

 

[Araris]

Finally got the game running to an acceptable standard. Looks absolutely gorgeous on Ultra. Everything on Ultra, even foliage distance (hairworks is turned off, I think Geralt's hair looks better w/out it).
Software Settings:
Afterburner + RivaTuner Statistics Server - Forced 60fps Framelimiter
Nvidia Control Panel - 16xAF, Maximum Performance, 1x Pre-rendered frames, vsync+triple buffering forced on.
Nvidia Driver - 350.12 - The new Witcher 3 driver kept crashing on me after about 10-20 minutes of playing.
Witcher 3 - Graphics: Everything on Ultra, hairworks disabled. Chromatic + Sharpening disabled.

Logged to file shows zero drops below 60fps (outside cutscenes) and frame pacing of 16.2ms-17.1ms 95% of the time with jumps into the low 20ms range very rarely (usually on area transition). Logging was done for 6 hours straight. I've experience zero crashes over that time and haven't noticed any stuttering.

Intel Core i7 5820k @ 4.4Ghz
GTX Titan X (1100Mhz - 1202Mhz depending on boost clock + temperature)
16GB DDR4 2666Mhz
EVGA X99 Micro - Samsung SSD 850
LG OLED 55" 1920x1080p - Xbox One Controller

 

[georly]

I don't know if this is the thread to ask a question like this... but It's sorta pc performance related...

Anyone have an issue where after an hour or so the game kinda freezes (music still plays) and it sorta 'minimizes' you to desktop, and alt-tabbing back into the game does nothing?

Game looks great otherwise while playing, but it's just annoying that after hitting the one hour mark, the game essentially stops.

If this is the wrong thread for this, let me know.

 

[nomis]

Finally got the game running to an acceptable standard. Looks absolutely gorgeous on Ultra. Everything on Ultra, even foliage distance (hairworks is turned off, I think Geralt's hair looks better w/out it).
Software Settings:
Afterburner + RivaTuner Statistics Server - Forced 60fps Framelimiter
Nvidia Control Panel - 16xAF, Maximum Performance, 1x Pre-rendered frames, vsync+triple buffering forced on.
Nvidia Driver - 350.12 - The new Witcher 3 driver kept crashing on me after about 10-20 minutes of playing.
Witcher 3 - Graphics: Everything on Ultra, hairworks disabled. Chromatic + Sharpening disabled.

Logged to file shows zero drops below 60fps (outside cutscenes) and frame pacing of 16.2ms-17.1ms 95% of the time with jumps into the low 20ms range very rarely (usually on area transition). Logging was done for 6 hours straight. I've experience zero crashes over that time and haven't noticed any stuttering.

Intel Core i7 5820k @ 4.4Ghz
GTX Titan X (1100Mhz - 1202Mhz depending on boost clock + temperature)
16GB DDR4 2666Mhz
EVGA X99 Micro - Samsung SSD 850
LG OLED 55" 1920x1080p - Xbox One Controller

I feel like playing this game on Ultra with good frame timing and locked 60fps on an OLED tv is about as close to the perfect experience as you can get. I hesitate to even call it "reference" because even the people in the studio didn't get to see it like that.

 

[Seanspeed]

how demanding is downsampling I am just curious if its noticeable and better to go one setting up from 1080. I have 970 16gb of ram and i5 3570k

Downsampling is very demanding. But just one notch above 1080p(assuming we're talking about DSR) is really quite minimal in terms of improvement. It's worth doing if you've got performance to spare but otherwise I tend to feel that down sampling only really starts making a worthwhile difference with higher amounts, like starting at 1440p. Depends on the game sometimes and how bad the aliasing issues are, though. Certain games really need all the antialiasing they can get.

Feel free to just try it out, obviously. Experiment with it a bit if you like the results or shrug it off as not worth it if you think the performance hit is too much. Up to you.

 

[SixStringPsycho]

Out of topic from this game. Im playing witcher 2 and im rocking an r9 290x 4gb an amd fx8350 and 16gb of ram. Game even drops to 20 fps. Was that game badly optimized for pc? Do I need to download something to get constant framerate on it.

 

[Seanspeed]

Out of topic from this game. Im playing witcher 2 and im rocking an r9 290x 4gb an amd fx8350 and 16gb of ram. Game even drops to 20 fps. Was that game badly optimized for pc? Do I need to download something to get constant framerate on it.

Turn ubersampling off. Otherwise your performance shouldn't be that bad.

 

[x3sphere]

Finally got the game running to an acceptable standard. Looks absolutely gorgeous on Ultra. Everything on Ultra, even foliage distance (hairworks is turned off, I think Geralt's hair looks better w/out it).
Software Settings:
Afterburner + RivaTuner Statistics Server - Forced 60fps Framelimiter
Nvidia Control Panel - 16xAF, Maximum Performance, 1x Pre-rendered frames, vsync+triple buffering forced on.
Nvidia Driver - 350.12 - The new Witcher 3 driver kept crashing on me after about 10-20 minutes of playing.
Witcher 3 - Graphics: Everything on Ultra, hairworks disabled. Chromatic + Sharpening disabled.

Logged to file shows zero drops below 60fps (outside cutscenes) and frame pacing of 16.2ms-17.1ms 95% of the time with jumps into the low 20ms range very rarely (usually on area transition). Logging was done for 6 hours straight. I've experience zero crashes over that time and haven't noticed any stuttering.

Intel Core i7 5820k @ 4.4Ghz
GTX Titan X (1100Mhz - 1202Mhz depending on boost clock + temperature)
16GB DDR4 2666Mhz
EVGA X99 Micro - Samsung SSD 850
LG OLED 55" 1920x1080p - Xbox One Controller

Nice setup there I've been playing this on my OLED too - the vibrant colors really show off what this display is capable of. Looks incredible.

 

[slash3584]

how demanding is downsampling I am just curious if its noticeable and better to go one setting up from 1080. I have 970 16gb of ram and i5 3570k

I'm playing with every setting on ultra except shadows and foliage, downsampled from 1440p + hairworks and reshade and I'm getting a pretty stable 30fps with similar specs:

i5 2500K OC 4.3
GTX 970 G1
8GB DDR3 ram

The resolution difference really improved how most of the vegetation looks. Before it was good looking but now it's gorgeous.

 

[finalflame]

I feel like playing this game on Ultra with good frame timing and locked 60fps on an OLED tv is about as close to the perfect experience as you can get. I hesitate to even call it "reference" because even the people in the studio didn't get to see it like that.

I am pretty sure CDPR has OLED professional monitors, such as:

https://pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/cat-monitors/cat-oledmonitors/product-BVMX300/

When they have entire video/graphics teams.

Finally got the game running to an acceptable standard. Looks absolutely gorgeous on Ultra. Everything on Ultra, even foliage distance (hairworks is turned off, I think Geralt's hair looks better w/out it).
Software Settings:
Afterburner + RivaTuner Statistics Server - Forced 60fps Framelimiter
Nvidia Control Panel - 16xAF, Maximum Performance, 1x Pre-rendered frames, vsync+triple buffering forced on.
Nvidia Driver - 350.12 - The new Witcher 3 driver kept crashing on me after about 10-20 minutes of playing.
Witcher 3 - Graphics: Everything on Ultra, hairworks disabled. Chromatic + Sharpening disabled.

Logged to file shows zero drops below 60fps (outside cutscenes) and frame pacing of 16.2ms-17.1ms 95% of the time with jumps into the low 20ms range very rarely (usually on area transition). Logging was done for 6 hours straight. I've experience zero crashes over that time and haven't noticed any stuttering.

Intel Core i7 5820k @ 4.4Ghz
GTX Titan X (1100Mhz - 1202Mhz depending on boost clock + temperature)
16GB DDR4 2666Mhz
EVGA X99 Micro - Samsung SSD 850
LG OLED 55" 1920x1080p - Xbox One Controller

Awesome setup man. I am envious of your OLED TV. I hope I can pick one of those babies up come Holiday season with a decent bonus check from work. They look really, really good.

 

[CSX]

how demanding is downsampling I am just curious if its noticeable and better to go one setting up from 1080. I have 970 16gb of ram and i5 3570k

Im on a titan X and running it at 1517p (the halfway point between 1080p and 4k). Outsides of cutscenes, fps moves around between 45-low 50s.

 

[M.D]

Turn ubersampling off. Otherwise your performance shouldn't be that bad.

I think my rig is comparable to his and my frame rate was 60 most of the time with drops to 45 or 50 in areas with lots of foliage

Do you have Ubersampling on? I'm not even playing at 1080p and that's the only reason I got any drops, without it I had none

If you're playing at 1080p it makes sense you'd have drops, maybe not to 20 tho..

 

[FiraB]

Decide to boost this to ultra to see how my 7970ghz would handle it and didnt even dent it much outside of 10fps, still averaging 35fps.

Turned off CA and sharpness, worthless additions.

4960k @ 4.2
16GB DDR3 2133
7970ghz with slight overclock.

Only thing i couldnt have at ultra was draw distance and shadows (left at high), the rest of the settings at max. Kept hairworks off though, it was just a frame killer even when i tried it on my 780.

 

[Makareu]

I'm playing with every setting on ultra except shadows and foliage, downsampled from 1440p + hairworks and reshade and I'm getting a pretty stable 30fps with similar specs:

i5 2500K OC 4.3
GTX 970 G1
8GB DDR3 ram

The resolution difference really improved how most of the vegetation looks. Before it was good looking but now it's gorgeous.

I agree that once you see how improved the vegetation is with down sampling , it is really hard to go back. I have yet to decide between down sampling and 60 fps ...

 

[DeFiBkIlLeR]

Well this is annoying.

Fired up Project Cars for the first time since installing the new Nvidia 'Witcher 3' driver and performance has tanked, frame drops all over the place where there were none before.

Reinstalled the 350.12 drivers and performance is back to normal in Project Cars.

Just to be certain, reinstalled W3 driver and...shit Project Cars performance, only good news is that performance in GTA V is unaffected with either driver.

So, a choice between SLI enabled support in Witcher 3 or shitty performance in Project Cars.

Oh, how I love PC gaming at times.

 

[JBourne]

how demanding is downsampling I am just curious if its noticeable and better to go one setting up from 1080. I have 970 16gb of ram and i5 3570k

You could get a solid 30 fps on that setup using 1440p, hairworks on, and HBAO+. That's what I was originally playing at on a similar setup, but I decided to go for 55-60 fps and 1080p instead. Playing in borderless fullscreen, it looks smooth enough for me to not notice the variation in framerate.

A lot of my issues with stuttering seemed to stem from vsync. Turning it off, setting the framerate to unlimited, and playing in borderless fullscreen made all the difference.

edit: also using RTSS, as Durante's article suggests.

 

[ApharmdX]

Yeah but at 1440 I don't need aa (this game Looks great without aa at 1440)

Quick addendum, I'm getting 35-60 fps at 1440p and all settings Ultra with the latest patch. Includes Hairworks and AA. I think I'll end up setting it to 30 max. There's a lot of fluctuation.

 

[Iztli]

Monitor goes black for 1sec randomly. It happened to 2 times in a row but the game still works flawlessly after it happens. Has this happened to anyone? Only occurs with this game.

 

[Lingitiz]

After messing with settings the last few days it seems the only one that really makes a huge FPS difference is foliage visibility distance. Shadows has an impact too but nowhere near as much as foliage. HBAO+, water, grass, detail, textures, background characters, terrain can be put on ultra without much frame rate loss.

 

[Dries]

Ok I've read Durante's article now.

What about for people with G-Sync? I normally play full screen and don't use a frame limiter. From what I played last night at 60-70fps it was pretty smooth.

G-sync works great in The Witcher 3. I still cap my fps with MSI Afterburner though. As the transition from lower framerate to higher framerates is completely smooth, you can still notice when you're in areas that make your framerate suffer in the 30's region. You can have a great framerate in some areas, but then you'll come across some dense woods or such and that'll send your framerate down quite a ways. G-sync eliminates the stuttering and tearing when that happens and that works perfectly. Still, capping my framerate allows me to keep some continuity in my performance and framerate and therefore grants me an overall smoother performance.

So yes, even with G-sync I would recommend capping your framerate, but that's just my personal preference.

Right now I'm capping my framerate at 45 fps with a 2500K 4.4Ghz and single 980. Playing at 1440p, no Hairworks, and all settings Ultra.

Sadly though, the engine stuttering (like the Horse walking animation) does not get eliminated by G-sync.

 

[DeathGlobe]

You could get a solid 30 fps on that setup using 1440p, hairworks on, and HBAO+. That's what I was originally playing at on a similar setup, but I decided to go for 55-60 fps and 1080p instead. Playing in borderless fullscreen, it looks smooth enough for me to not notice the variation in framerate.

A lot of my issues with stuttering seemed to stem from vsync. Turning it off, setting the framerate to unlimited, and playing in borderless fullscreen made all the difference.

edit: also using RTSS, as Durante's article suggests.

Currently playing at 60 fps 1080p no hair works shadows on medium and vegetation at high. It runs smooth I was just looking for ways to improve the look further. I am using Nvida panel for fxaa since I read the In game aa was kinda crappy

 

[Apt101]

i7-4790s
GTX 970
12 GB 1600
Mirrored 7200 SATA's
1920x1080

All settings high save for textures, which is ultra. Post processing is all at the highest. 60 fps max. Vsync on.

With HairWorks off I am consistently getting 60 (55-60 hovering in some fights). HW just Geralt about 52, HairWorks all it dips down to into the low 40's with a few mobs with hair, several mobs it drops further into the sub 40's.

 

[Zoggy]

Out of topic from this game. Im playing witcher 2 and im rocking an r9 290x 4gb an amd fx8350 and 16gb of ram. Game even drops to 20 fps. Was that game badly optimized for pc? Do I need to download something to get constant framerate on it.

i have a 290 (not x) and 6300 and i had wide ranges of fps playing w2 as well. 60 to high 30s as soon as 5+ npcs came onscreen. it was weird.

i'm getting excellent perf on w3 tho

 

[KaiserAlucard]

I can't go fullscreen mode anymore, the game is stuck on borderless windows. How to solve that? I can't get the benefits of G-sync anymore...

 

[finalflame]

I can't go fullscreen mode anymore, the game is stuck on borderless windows. How to solve that? I can't get the benefits of G-sync anymore...

I struggled with this for a while. I am not sure what fixed it, but when you go into nVidia Control Panel, check: Adjust desktop size and position -> Scaling -> Make sure "Aspect Ratio" is checked. Apply and exit. Try the game again.

Someone in this thread suggested it, and while I didn't explicitly do that, I did fuck with my monitor res/refresh profile at some point.

 

[Thoraxes]

Ok I've read Durante's article now.

What about for people with G-Sync? I normally play full screen and don't use a frame limiter. From what I played last night at 60-70fps it was pretty smooth.

Only thing I found weird is that the i7 3820k mentioned in the article is a Sandy Bridge-e, not Haswell-e. Haswell-e is 58xx.

 

[KaiserAlucard]

I struggled with this for a while. I am not sure what fixed it, but when you go into nVidia Control Panel, check: Adjust desktop size and position -> Scaling -> Make sure "Aspect Ratio" is checked. Apply and exit. Try the game again.

Someone in this thread suggested it, and while I didn't explicitly do that, I did fuck with my monitor res/refresh profile at some point.

Thanks a lot it worked
Still it's very strange because I didn't touch anything and it happened after patch 1.03...

 

[EatChildren]

Anybody think my ambient occlusions look off? Sometimes they're stronger than I expected HBAO+ to be.

 

[Chrizzy_81]

I don't know if this is the thread to ask a question like this... but It's sorta pc performance related...

Anyone have an issue where after an hour or so the game kinda freezes (music still plays) and it sorta 'minimizes' you to desktop, and alt-tabbing back into the game does nothing?

Game looks great otherwise while playing, but it's just annoying that after hitting the one hour mark, the game essentially stops.

If this is the wrong thread for this, let me know.

Yes... I had this problem constantly after about an hour of playing yesterday. If you are running an NVIDIA card I would strongly recommend you roll back to the GTA V drivers (hopefully just for now), I have had zero freeze issues since I did so. Hopefully they can sort that shit out soon as I'm guessing they must have a reason to release game specific drivers but something has been borked on certain cards I would guess. For reference I'm running a 750ti.

 

[b0uncyfr0]

Which gives better AA...Sweetfx FXAA or SMAA?

I have a 280X so no Nv FXAA, unless there's a special injector i dont know about.

 

[CuckFupertino]

Looking at everyone's GPU clock speeds, I am just now realizing my 980 is "super clocked," or factory OCed.

Base clock is advertised as 1266mhz with a boost clock to 1367mhz, but I swear last time I opened Precision X it said my boost clock was over 1400mhz. I haven't changed the clock speeds at all in any program, they're just set to factory standards. I have a few questions:

1. Can I down clock to a non-overclocked speed, and should I? I'm generally seeing much better performance than people with similar setups on here, and I'm just now realizing it's probably the factory over clocking. I am still having an occasional issue with infinite loading screens.

2. Is it just me or is that an unusually fast clock speed for GPU? Even those of you with Titan X's have lower clock speeds. Is it because those GPU's have more cuda cores? Forgive my general ignorance.

 

[spuckthew]

I don't know if this is the thread to ask a question like this... but It's sorta pc performance related...

Anyone have an issue where after an hour or so the game kinda freezes (music still plays) and it sorta 'minimizes' you to desktop, and alt-tabbing back into the game does nothing?

Game looks great otherwise while playing, but it's just annoying that after hitting the one hour mark, the game essentially stops.

If this is the wrong thread for this, let me know.

That sounds very similar to the display driver crashing. Mine crashed again this morning after 45 minutes or so despite the change I made to global power management mode in NVCP and opting to create manual saves over quick saves.

What card are you using because it may be worth rolling back?

I save frequently enough for it to not be too much of a nuisance as long as it continues to not happen often, but I am also worried rolling back will have some ill effect on my system because my performance is by no means bad.