I remember earlier I mentioned in this thread (and others too) about switching PhysX duties to the CPU in the NCP and were basically laughed at and ignored saying it didn't do anything. Funny how this is coming up again and the meta is changing.
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Witcher 3 PC Performance Thread
- Thread starter batman2million
- Start date
Hmmm... Last night I hooked up my new 1440 monitor and assumed the shit performance on my 780ti was due to the resolution increase. I forgot that installing a new monitor also means new settings in GeForce Control Panel. I'll have to double check everything there. I'm sure it's defaulting the physx to my GPU. I'm barely getting mid 40s fps in high settings. Hopefully that Kepler fix is out tonight too.
I got 2 GB
Do I really need more than 2 GB for witcher 3@1080p? What happens if I buy another card but its 4 GB? Will it only count 2 GB?
That is indeed odd..though maybe my factory oc'd 980 is enough for graphics and physx?
Anyway, I will test some more later tonight when I get home from work.
I remember. I think that may have been due to people who tried it using Maxwell cards. This seems to be a fix for Kelper cards.
I've seen my VRAM a little over 2gb (ultra textures of course), but other games will require more, especially going forward. Not sure about pairing a 4gb and 2gb version of the same card... I'm not even sure you can. If it even worked, you would definitely be limited to 2gb.
You can't pair a 2gb and 4gb version of the same card in sli. If you have a 2gb you need to get another 2gb.
Don't do it just for this one game because it happens to be ok with 2gb GPU's at 1080p.... You will encounter issues with other games in the future and quite a few that are already out now in fact.
Save your money till you can get a 970 or similar.
Hrmm, yeah... I guess I will test this out to see how it affects my GPU usage...
Do you have the second card as set as 'Dedicate to PhysX'? If so, it should, no matter what obey that and run the physx on that card regardless of how powerful your primary card is.
GPU usage PhysX dedicated to 2nd GPU (14%):
GPU usage, SLI off, PhysX on CPU (0%):
Surely at this point it's a reasonable assumption that there is something going on with PhysX on the GPU (when we assumed there was none), unless, as I said earlier, I'm being stupid
That's not true. You can pair a 4gb and a 2gb 680.......... you'll just have the amount of ram of the lower card.... so you'll only have 2gb of vram in this situation. If your bottleneck is performance not vram, you'll see a nice improvement.
Unless you can get another 680 dirt cheap though, I would just move on to a 970 or something else for increased performance and more vram.
if you can't tell, theres no reason to have it on max. isn't pc gaming beautiful? you are the creator........(of things already created)
Is it possible it's because you are using a Maxwell card? Would using a Kepler card be better here?
Absolutely. I just wanted to test whether there is any impact on a Maxwell card, since someone asked earlier and I was curious myself.
Interestingly, with the ~5-10% performance improvement reported Kepler cards would slot in much closer to where you'd expect them both compared to Maxwell and compared to AMD results.
Well this started off as a 'fix' for Kepler performance. So getting data points from Maxwell cards is useful to see if this is something unique to Kepler (or all non-Maxwell cards) or a general issue with the game that also affects Maxwell, looks like it doesn't affect Maxwell though.
Then it's probably safe to say that this particular issue isn't affecting Maxwell.
All I know is on my GTX 770 4GB (@1080p, NV Inspector/RTSS 30 fps cap, all Post Processing on, all "Ultra" but for Shadows and Foliage at "High," HairWorks off) with Geralt on his horse sitting in White Orchard's Abandoned Village looking out to the forest, I was getting 78% GPU usage with no fix, and 68% usage with the fix on. I loaded an identical save each time, being careful not to move the mouse.
Like I said, the fix seems to help some areas, and do nothing in others, and with a game that is so dynamic (ToD, weather patterns, and camera angle can change the performance drastically in the exact same area), it's hard to come to any concrete conclusions.
But the fix does seem to do "something," at least on Kepler.
Thanks for checking it out!!!
As in... maxwell uses the CPU for these things already (that would be odd)? Or is it that offloading it to the CPU on Maxwell garners no performance increase? (which I would doubt).
What is the area with the largest amount of Apex Cloth physics going on? I did not notice any difference when just walking around the bog.
Does anyone know if using an overlay such as MSI afterburner causes Reshade/sweetfx to not work?
Upon closer inspection, the PhysX to CPU fix seems to have entirely cured (what I thought was) the load stutter I was getting in large towns like Novigrad and Oxenfurt on my GTX 770 4GB.
Before the fix, I'd run down the street, and the game would hitch every second or two (even with my 850 Pro SSD), no matter what settings I had the game on. I had just given up and thought it was an issue with the engine in the towns with dozens of NPCs. This might also be the reason some (Kepler?) players were experiencing stutter, even with Durante's recommended fps capping method.
Or I'm full of it, whichever ;p
Before the fix, I'd run down the street, and the game would hitch every second or two (even with my 850 Pro SSD), no matter what settings I had the game on. I had just given up and thought it was an issue with the engine in the towns with dozens of NPCs. This might also be the reason some (Kepler?) players were experiencing stutter, even with Durante's recommended fps capping method.
Or I'm full of it, whichever ;p
So...Ive been having weird crashes lately basically it goes like this:
1. Play Game
2. 10 -20 minutes in crashes (freeze black screen, audio still plays, game is still controllable but screen is black even when alt tabbing back to desktop)
3. Hard reboot
4. Play Game fine for hours and then quit
5. start up game again and play for ten to 20 minutes until it crashes the same way
6. repeat
Ive now just started doing a full reboot before I play the Witcher 3 and it seems to not crash during a play session not immediately followed by a reboot.
1. Play Game
2. 10 -20 minutes in crashes (freeze black screen, audio still plays, game is still controllable but screen is black even when alt tabbing back to desktop)
3. Hard reboot
4. Play Game fine for hours and then quit
5. start up game again and play for ten to 20 minutes until it crashes the same way
6. repeat
Ive now just started doing a full reboot before I play the Witcher 3 and it seems to not crash during a play session not immediately followed by a reboot.
So basically when it comes to Kepler they screwed the pooch big time on PhysX allocation it seems? Excited to try this fix and glad it's something so simple. At times my performance was fine with a 780 while other (seemingly random) situations plummeted it into the 20s. Hoping to get 1440p / all high settings / 30 FPS locked.
I'm not sure, maybe it is supposed to run on the GPU and indeed does on Maxwell, but the performance impact is marginal? Whereas on Kepler be it a bug or otherwise, GPU library for it isn't working properly resulting in worse performance?
Although I would maybe expect, if that was case, that for Maxwell owners they'd see a decrease in their framerate if they put PhysX on the CPU.
Eh. I don't know, it's a weird situation.
It's probably just a case of Kepler overriding (for some reason) the program offloading PhysX to the CPU. So whereas Maxwell just lets the CPU handle it, Kepler probably has some flag mistakenly enabled where it steps in and does all the work itself. That would be my layman's guess, but who knows really.
I remoted into my desktop at the house and pulled up the physX settings so I will test it out before/after the fix when I get home.
I was having all kinds of crashes last night though. At first I thought it was from overclocking my 980 (Gigabyte G1) but returning it to defaults in afterburner still had issues.
What's crazy is that I've NEVER seen my GPU heat up the way it does with Witcher 3. Not even GTA V is getting it as hot as it does on W3 (71*C max)
Wondering if dumping PhysX to the CPU will alleviate some of that or not.??
I know my PSU (EVGA supernova 850 G2) is plenty and no other game has any stability problems so if I still have crashes with the PhysX set to CPU, I'm just going to chalk this up to the game/nvidia drivers needing to be fixed.
FWIW, I've also tried running the game with sweet fx disabled, frap is not running, I've tried disabling Riva Tuner Statistics Server, running borderless windowed vs full screen, etc...
On the other hand, with hairworks off and everything else maxed out, it's pretty much staying locked at 60fps and only dipping down to the low 50's all through white orchard.
If I still have crashes I may see if temporarily pointing a really high RPM fan at the GPU to get the temps back down into the 60's help fix the problem. I can't imagine that 71*C is hot enough to cause the driver to stop responding/crash but hell... at this point, I'm wiling to try anything. If that actually solves the problem, I may end up just getting an EK block for it and calling it a day.
I was having all kinds of crashes last night though. At first I thought it was from overclocking my 980 (Gigabyte G1) but returning it to defaults in afterburner still had issues.
What's crazy is that I've NEVER seen my GPU heat up the way it does with Witcher 3. Not even GTA V is getting it as hot as it does on W3 (71*C max)
Wondering if dumping PhysX to the CPU will alleviate some of that or not.??
I know my PSU (EVGA supernova 850 G2) is plenty and no other game has any stability problems so if I still have crashes with the PhysX set to CPU, I'm just going to chalk this up to the game/nvidia drivers needing to be fixed.
FWIW, I've also tried running the game with sweet fx disabled, frap is not running, I've tried disabling Riva Tuner Statistics Server, running borderless windowed vs full screen, etc...
On the other hand, with hairworks off and everything else maxed out, it's pretty much staying locked at 60fps and only dipping down to the low 50's all through white orchard.
If I still have crashes I may see if temporarily pointing a really high RPM fan at the GPU to get the temps back down into the 60's help fix the problem. I can't imagine that 71*C is hot enough to cause the driver to stop responding/crash but hell... at this point, I'm wiling to try anything. If that actually solves the problem, I may end up just getting an EK block for it and calling it a day.
Well I deleted that file and novigrade center went from 24-25 fps up to 29-31. Strange.
Seems odd that there would be a library for 'Apex_ClothingGPU' if it wasn't meant to run on the GPU - of course that's an analysis purely based on the name of a file. Unless of course it was supposed to be a feature but it was cut, yet the library was left in and it is as you're describing.
Rhaknar
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They / Them
why in the blue hell did the game revert to low textures? I didnt even notice until checked the settings for whatever reason (I did notice when I bumped it up to ultra tho). game still runs at 60 too so big fat shrug
did the entire of white orchid at 1080p all maxed (except for however long I was with low textures lol), so if its holding up during that, I should be in the clear for the rest?
did the entire of white orchid at 1080p all maxed (except for however long I was with low textures lol), so if its holding up during that, I should be in the clear for the rest?
1.04 did that to me too. All my other settings were the same but textures reverted to low.
I don't think anything in White Orchard pushes the game to any real degree. There areas after, specifically the bogs and cities, where people seem to run into the largest performance hits. I dropped a few of my settings down from ultra to high once I got into those areas to maintain a more consistent framerate.
I've just started seeing the same issues today, too. It had worked perfectly fine after unlocking the frame cap and for much longer play sessions but is now having issues. My system:
i7 2600k at stock
16 GB RAM at stock
Asus Strix GTX 970, no overclock on my part
Can't tell the difference in image quality. Performance gets much better.
I may need to check this out. On a 7850, I have everything on high except for shadows on medium.
Can anyone who can tell the difference explain low to med difference please?
Forgot to mention Im using the Witcher Game ready driver from NVidia on my GTX 970 SSC ACX 2.0+
Ill try unlocking my framerate to see if that helps.
I just clarified my post. The framerate unlock fixed a previous crash not related to this one. It's still unlocked and I've started seeing the same problem you described. Sorry for the confusion.
borderless windowed mode!
I'm not sure why this isn't more of a thing. Not only that, but you get to keep your ICC profile if you have any sort of calibration going on.
Having 2 GPUs would be the biggest argument against it. G-Sync/Freesync as well.
Tried this in the exact same spot and got similar results. FPS went from 76 to 85 without hairworks, 66 to 74 with. Better than nothing I suppose, but doesn't this change affect all configurations, not just setups with Kepler cards?
SLI and gsync doesnt work in b/l windowed. I also get stuttering in b/l windowed that completely goes away as soon as I go fullscreen mode. Very noticeable, happens every time I launch the game since it defaults to borderless windowed and I have to set it back.
I love b/l windowed in other games though.
What are people using to force vsync at 30fps? Read above that using the vsync in the game is what's causing the juddering/frame pacing issues? I used Nvidia control panel but it still does it...
Just wondering what program people using to force vsync that might be better than the Nvidia control panel?
Just wondering what program people using to force vsync that might be better than the Nvidia control panel?