Analysis
Features:
Originally Dx9 based but has adopted many Dx11 features
Tessellation is in (ground, rocks, bridges)
SSR on water
Weather effects
Global illumination emulation
Dof effects on camera due to weather
Game uses image based lighting
Also uses dynamic point lights which reflects on the environment's objects including geralts armor etc..
PC (970GTX) vs Consoles
Consoles run foliage on high
Ultra foliage on PC draws a greater distance but very minor from high in difference
Lighting and PP effects are at the highest setting on both consoles and PC (bloom, shafts of light, long shadows from objects etc..)
Weather system is equal across console and PC
AO and AF dialed back on consoles (some say due to a patch) in cutscenes
HBAO+ works well with foliage in W3 on PC, not worth it if you don't have an Nvidia card, generally costs more than it impresses.
Grass density medium quality on consoles
Terrain quality is on high with detail level being equal to PC
Particle effects are equal to the Pc's best.
Shadows never seem to change from any notable degree from medium to ultra.
Discrepancies (console side)
Consoles have lower shadow quality and AO than the lowest pc settings at times, but they're predominantly at medium shadow quality and makes use of ssao most of the time.
Textures are predominantly high on consoles with some mix of medium textures, ground textures are usually the culprit for medium quality.
Ultra textures are the same quality as high, but then ultra textures never go beyond 1.8GB of VRAM on PC. (which makes the use of medium textures at all very questionable)
Color depth look 16-bit rather than 32-bit on consoles
Texture loading is slower on consoles, even the integrated A10 R7 on chip gpu handles texture loading much better/faster with ultra textures in place.(smh, should not be)
Loading times are much faster on PC, at least 5 times faster. Sometimes consoles take over a minute to load in some instances. (not common)
Water effects are high on console which includes tessellated movement and interaction, but there's some shader work that's absent on consoles that even the lowest setting on PC has (smh at cdpr, clearly they needed more time with consoles)
Water also lacks the interaction with spells (like the force blast), which is apparent on PC at high settings, such effects are not apparent on consoles.
Note: He indicates that the consoles seem to have been behind in development due to some of the results we're seeing here, just like dying light was. He also indicated that CDPR is primarily a PC developer and PC was the lead platform for development.
He expects that consoles will see a nice boost in quality and performance in the coming patches since it was behind PC in dev for the most part. The texture issue may also be linked to a loading time issue which looks to be API related something which more time and experience can fix.
PS4 vs XB1
PS4 and XB1 has the same settings employed for the most part, however;
PS4 is 1080p vs the XB 900p (which is standard fare by now)
PS4 has 8xAF throughout whilst the XB1 uses a dynamic 4x-8xAF depending on the scene.
Water on XB1 seems slightly better, closer to PC but not quite there.
IQ on XB1 is worse due to 900p and the upscaled image issues with the custom fxaa and temporal aa implementation
Framerate is smoother on PS4 over the XB1. Xb1 framerate is unlocked to help support drops better due to the limited buffer space on XB1.
PS4 would normally drop the odd frame whilst loading new areas (loading issue) which exists on all versions, but since PS4 is capped you will see it dropping to 29fps whilst horseback riding here and there. (my opinion, when the xb1 version is capped it will drop more frames in these sessions, because the unlocked framerate would no longer keep it just barely at 30fps or above)
General impressions and Summary
Cutscenes vary wildly in performance
Hairworks is very unrefined at the moment just as tressfx was initially. Hairworks is not that impressive considering the 20fps performance penalty on average. Geralts hair looks better without it.
Tessellation should be set to at least 8x when hairworks is on (PC) to make it look good.
PhysX is on consoles (though emulated on the CPU)
Witcher 3 is
NOT CPU limited, it is GPU limited however. It is
NOT a CPU killer. All the testing PC's were almost always at 100% buffer usage (gpu wise). On the flipside, cpu usage even on the A10 hardly every taps a single core. All cores operate with lots and lots of room/cycles to spare. No core is ever maxed out, even paired with the entry level 750ti.
A dual core is enough for the game. A quad core is not entirely needed as it hardly uses over 4 cores.
750ti Shenanigans
The 750ti performs close to the consoles with similar settings, helped of course by its unlocked state in the comparison, however it does dip below 30fps more often than the PS4 and it performs just slightly better than the XB1 which is also unlocked.
750ti is also constantly below 30fps in the swamp area, other areas it holds up a bit better and is more comparable to the PS4. It's nasty in the swamp areas though.
Micellaneous
PS4 version is sharper than both the PC and XB1 version (IQ is better there), that's even when the pc version's blur effect is set to off and sharpening is set to on.
PS4 versions suffers more in cutscenes due to the cap/double buffer and graphics API. There's camera and movement stutter in all versions. Geralt's movement feels more binary than analog. It's weird that Geralt leaps into a running animation (almost abruptly) rather than a smoother transition.
W3 2013 vs Release
Renderer completely changed from 2013. There was a denser lighting system, better G.I implementation, much richer particle system, far denser topology model in the 2013 version of W3 .