Witcher 3 - Drivers & Tuning

Gorath

Gorath

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A lot of gamers in our forum and at other places on the interweb are having fun tuning The Witcher 3. I'll post a couple of random infos and links to support you in your quest.


  • nVidia released a new optimized driver
  • You own a GTX Titan X? Congratulations, nVidia has a free The Witcher 3 for you!
  • An optimized driver by AMD should come out this week
  • GameStar's technik check (->traffic light system) gives you a good idea whether your PC can run the game. Just go through (1) graphics card, (2) CPU and (3) RAM. The weakest color counts.
  • PC Games Hardware analyzed the performance of 22 graphics cards and the CPU scaling. Surprising result: If you have a decent CPU with at least 4 cores, The Witcher 3 is graphics card limited even on 1280*768 without AA/AF and post-processing!
  • nVidia published a very detailed tuning guide
  • The first dozen SweetFX profiles for W3 have been created. Here's one random video to get you started.
More information.
 
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Can we get a translation for both GameStar's technik check and PC Games Hardware articles? (They are in German language).
 
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Sorry, not from me.

The table is worth a look. The colors mean:
red: forget it
yellow: runs in low detail
light green: runs fluently in medium detail
dark green: high or ultra, but still no hairworks

All 1080p, 40+ fps.
 
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I was thinking both pages could contain a button labeled "Click here to see it in English" or anything like that
 
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Bah, they didn't include my Intel i7-950 CPU. It's a 5-year-old 4 core CPU, but there's plenty of CPUs in that graph that are yellow, although I kinda have a hard time believing the game is so CPU heavy as to make the game crawl...
 
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The answer to that is mentioned in the newsbit.
The GameStar guide is a bit older than the PCGH article. It looks like they didn't know about the graphics card limitation.
 
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Gorath said:
The answer to that is mentioned in the newsbit.
The GameStar guide is a bit older than the PCGH article. It looks like they didn't know about the graphics card limitation.
Click to expand...

Okay, thanks. I will definitely check out the newer article, too, then. The question is if my CPU is considered "a decent CPU with at least 4 cores"; it was 5 years ago, but… that was 5 years ago. :D

(Context: I'm considering getting a nVidia 960 GTX, which will get me a new video card and a free copy of The Witcher 3 for about 200 euro. :D)

EDIT: Seems like I'm fine, then. Also, I'm happy to see my German reading skills are pretty alright. :))
 
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Thaurin said:
(Context: I'm considering getting a nVidia 960 GTX, which will get me a new video card and a free copy of The Witcher 3 for about 200 euro. :D)
Click to expand...

Asus has a kickback thing running at the moment. Should bring their 960 another 25 EUR down.
 
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I own 2 Titan x's but when I try to get the codes on GeForce experience it doesn't work. I already bought the game anyway but it's annoying.
 
And you're running out of time for the W3 coupon.
I looked into the whole situation yesterday.
a) I decided not to buy a card with 2 GB RAM. The first few games which demand and reward more memory are already here, and more will come. (W3 is not one of them.)
b) New ATI cards have been announced yesterday. Same cards as last gen, but more and faster memory. So the market will react in some way.
 
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I can confirm that an old (but good) processor is not a problem if you have a modern mid-range gaming card.

My PC with these:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650 OC 3.33GHZ
VGA: SAPPHIRE HD 7950 3GB GDDR5 OC (AMD driver Omega - 14.12)
runs Witcher 3 fluidly @1080 with all post-processing settings on-high and video settings at Ultra (except: Hairworks disabled, foliage and grass at high).

Interestingly, although I have an AMD card, I can enable hairworks and it works pretty good, but I personally don't see such a great visual difference to justify the frame rate loss. Hairworks is the only thing that makes Witcher run near-under 30 FPS especially when there are wolves around.

- Edit: I have put foliage and grass to high because, aesthetically, I like how the game looks with slightly less foliage and grass not because of performance -

The game looks and runs beautifully. So far no glitches worth mentioning.

All n all, a pretty smooth launch.

(That's the technical report, the game is HUGE so I've barely scratched the surface with my 6 hour play through. I really like what I see so far.)
 
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sibroc said:
- Edit: I have put foliage and grass to high because, aesthetically, I like how the game looks with slightly less foliage and grass not because of performance) -
Click to expand...

Yeah I'm not the only one! Actually, I turn grass off in a few games because I can't find my loot on the ground...
 
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Gorath said:
And you're running out of time for the W3 coupon.
Click to expand...

Well, I called the store and they told me the deal is running until the end of the month, so there's a bit of time left. :)

I looked into the whole situation yesterday.
a) I decided not to buy a card with 2 GB RAM. The first few games which demand and reward more memory are already here, and more will come. (W3 is not one of them.)
Click to expand...

Yeah, I thought of that, too… but if I'm going to get a better card, the price quickly doubles. And I'm sort of thinking that if I start spending a lot of money now, it may not be worth doing so on this system rather than getting a completely new one, which I am not ready to do yet (since it still runs most stuff I play reasonbly well, and future games might, unlike TW3, get CPU bottlenecked?).

Decisions, decisions… but I still want TW3. ;)
 
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I'm running it on a laptop with quad core, but with a GTX 980M and it is very smooth, no stuttering at all, with most everything turned on to high settings.. I don't have the hairworks thing turned on though.
 
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The faces are what grabs me. Their expressions and eyes seem very real. A bit mesmerizing. Sadly, the lack of good lip synching with much of the NPC spoken English sort of ruins that immersion though. Apparently they only bothered to lip synch to English for Geralt in the first part of the game?
 
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Thrasher said:
The faces are what grabs me. Their expressions and eyes seem very real. A bit mesmerizing. Sadly, the lack of good lip synching with much of the NPC spoken English sort of ruins that immersion though. Apparently they only bothered to lip synch to English for Geralt in the first part of the game?
Click to expand...

From what I remember reading they didn't perform manual facial animation, since it would be an enormous task. And they're using some sort of a dynamic system that approximates facial movement based on the text that's being said. It's not perfect, but I think it's good enough.
 
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Thrasher said:
The faces are what grabs me. Their expressions and eyes seem very real. A bit mesmerizing. Sadly, the lack of good lip synching with much of the NPC spoken English sort of ruins that immersion though. Apparently they only bothered to lip synch to English for Geralt in the first part of the game?
Click to expand...

Yes, character graphics are the best I've seen in a game so far. Engaging in a dialogue is like watching an animation movie. Details on their skins and clothes are really incredible.
 
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One quick tuning report:

I have been alt-tabbing out of the game quite a bit, checking the internet, and had no problems the last couple days until today, when for the first time the game froze on the inventory screen, and basically my system became unstable and had to reboot, so not sure if there might be an issue with alt-tabbing out of the game, or if it was a one time glitch.
 
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