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Witcher 3 PC Performance Thread

JohngPR

Member
I haven't hit any pre-rendered in game stuff since 1.03, but the load screen cutscenes are still hitchy as hell for me. Could it have something to do with loading behind the scenes or some sort?

I'm thinking that's likely. Note how the opening cutscene before the title menu runs just fine.
 

Xtars

Member
Linked this in the downgrade thread and realized this might also be a place for it so here's a shameless self quote.

Link to post: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=164900043&postcount=7847

Saw this polish forum thread that might be a bit interesting.

A guy who achived some really nice results with a tweaked ini and color corrected sweetFX.

No more pastel colors, looks so much better.

UhRjFB.jpg

Google Translated source and more images
 

daninthemix

Member
The number of games I've heard "set power to Prefer Maximum Performance" is making me want to just set it and forget it globally.

Any downsides to this? Will the GPU still downclock when idle on the desktop?

Welp, just did it and my clockspeeds stay at low on the desktop and during web browsing, so I guess this setting applies only to games. Going to leave it on.
 

M.D

Member
Thank you for your willingness to help me! I figured it out from one of the posts above and it finally cranked my fps back to 60 with my clock speed of 1493mhz.



What I did was what was suggested in one of the other posts above by DPB. I basically went into nvidia control panel and selected "prefer maximum performance" in the power settings. Maybe give that a go and see if it will help? Hopefully this solves my problem for good though, because I was running my power settings at adaptive before and then the dip to 25 fps happened until I changed it to prefer maximum performance. It's just odd because it had never happened before to any of my other games.

I just did that (Power Management Mode > Prefer Maximum Settings, specifically for the game) and checked the core clock and memory clock while in-game

The memory clock is at 3005, but the GPU clcok is at 540 - I'm assuming that's the problem here? I turned UberSampling back on and got 28 PFS and nasty dips in the third chapter, this is definitely not the performance I had before this happened

I'm not sure what to do now.. any tips?

Edit: Fixed! Thanks for the help!

It seems I had to reset my PC after applying the settings for it to work. Do you guys recommend to apply it globally or just for the game?

Also, I've googled and it seems this is a fairly common problem with the 970 and even earlier Nvidia cards... google even completes the sentence for 970 540 mhz lol
I've even found one guy who described exactly what happened to me - playing The Witcher 2 and alt tabbing, then getting the performance drop
 

spuckthew

Member
whoever talked about doing manual saves instead of quicksaving is a freaking hero. Haven't had a crash since I started to save manually. Would crash pretty much every hour before this

I wonder if this is what was causing my crashing this morning... Twice this morning I had nvlddmkm crash, but I had clocked 14 hours up to the first crash without any issues whatsoever, so I'm hesitant to blame my GPU (it's only factory OC'd anyway). Plus, I've never had my display driver crash in all of the three years I've owned the card.

I did just turn off adaptive power management in NVCP as per someone else's suggestion - unsure why this was on in the first place - but I can't test this until later as I'm going out.

Re quick-saving: I was doing this a lot last night and was fine but I've only just left White Orchard and the second map seems slightly more demanding in places, so I'm not sure if it's a combination of dodgy power management (due to being set to adaptive), shoddy Kepler drivers, or quick-saving.

Either way, I'll start making manual saves again and see how it goes with that and power management on maximum performance.
 

MaddenNFL64

Member
So I had a long playthrough friday. No stallouts, no crashes. Maybe its temporary, who knows, but I played damn near 7-8 hours in one stretch, no issues, so.... maybe its done.

One thing I did was switch off the in game AA, vsync and fps limiter, and forced it all with Radeon Pro instead, using FXAA. Game looks great, and no issues, so I think ill just follow suit.
 
So I had a long playthrough friday. No stallouts, no crashes. Maybe its temporary, who knows, but I played damn near 7-8 hours in one stretch, no issues, so.... maybe its done.

One thing I did was switch off the in game AA, vsync and fps limiter, and forced it all with Radeon Pro instead, using FXAA. Game looks great, and no issues, so I think ill just follow suit.

Same here. Just finished a 3 hour session or so. No freezes or anything.
 
I don't have access to my machine right now, but my system is:

i7 4790k
16gb 1866 DDR3
Geforce GTX 780 6gb version

Maxed out, with hairworks on, I was getting wildly fluctuating rates of 40 down to around 18 fps, with hairworks off, it averaged at about 45. Should I expect better performance than this? This is the only game I have which performs near this poorly.

I haven't had a chance to play it since release day and I havent played with the configs, so I'm not sure how much I can squeeze out of it yet.
 

Denton

Member
Digital Foundry full face off is out:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-the-witcher-3-wild-hunt-face-off

PC sets itself apart in several key areas though. With foliage visibility range set to ultra, we get trees, plants and accompanying shadows rendered at a range far beyond anything possible on console. By comparison, PS4 and Xbox One treat each of these variables individually; trees use an equivalent to its medium setting, while foliage is on high, and shadow draw distance is low. It's a hybrid setup that can only be matched on PC by tweaking its .ini file variables manually (found in your documents folder). However, on the console front, both are exactly matched with each other in this area.
 

Nugg

Member
Hey guys, I've been away from Internet for the past two weeks for work issues. I'm about to get home, and fire this up on two GTX 970s. This thread is a bit intimidating, what can I expect if I push everything to the max at 1080p, including hairworks, 60fps?
 

Denton

Member
I was wrong, consoles don't even use PC ultra textures, far from it.

And, yet again...

Running through the game using our preferred budget PC set-up, featuring a Core i3 4130 and an Nvidia GTX 750 Ti, we found that we could achieve visual quality and frame-rates equivalent to the PS4 version of the game.

Face off is thread worthy I think :p
 
Is there any noticeable difference between ultra and high shadows, like higher shadow draw distance or shadow count on ultra?
It costs a few frames and the nvidia guide shows that shadows get a little bit clearer on ultra, but it's impossible for me to see the difference ingame, compared to high.

Other than hairworks and foliage distance then shadowing is the setting I look to turn down. If it can free up a few frames for other settings then that is great as the difference between medium and ultra isn't that big.

Check these out from Andy's nVidia guide: http://www.geforce.co.uk/whats-new/...-guide#the-witcher-3-wild-hunt-shadow-quality
 
Welp, just did it and my clockspeeds stay at low on the desktop and during web browsing, so I guess this setting applies only to games. Going to leave it on.

I was interested to know this but I keep forgetting to test. Thanks for the info; I think I will do the same and set "prefer maximum performance" globally as I am increasingly setting profiles with this on.

Off-topic from W3 but does any one know if applying this power management stops the GPU crashes on older games when running with an overclock? I find old games don't work too well with an overclocked GPU (to do with Maxwell architecture downclocking or something?) and I have to keep switching the OC off when playing these games.
 

Seanspeed

Banned
whoever talked about doing manual saves instead of quicksaving is a freaking hero. Haven't had a crash since I started to save manually. Would crash pretty much every hour before this
I think I've heard about three dozen different 'fixes' for crashes that have worked for people so far. lol

I haven't had a single crash since the update to 1.03, but I'm not taking that to mean I wont still run into a rash of crashes at some point. Before, I could get like 5 crashes in an hour, and then play the next 3 hours crash-free, then a crash, then a few more hours no problem, then a few crashes, etc etc.

The only thing I've done is underclock my card(to OEM stock speeds), which I don't really know if it's helping with crashes or not, but it certainly helps with temps, which seem unusually high when playing this game.

I'm still a little scared of going into the menus at times, but I'm saving often and the game boots and loads so quickly, it honestly hasn't been as much of a hassle as it would have been otherwise.
 

Ragus

Banned
Framerate locked to 30 with Rivia Tuner and Nvidia Control panel. Maximum buffered frames set to 1, afterburner shows solid 30fps and yet the game is much more fluid in dungeons than in open world.


Really frustrating. Does anyone also experience something like this?
 

Dommel

Member
Has anyone else have villager's popup right around you when entering a town or village?

I rode into Crow's Perch yesterday at the slowest horse speed and although there were already a lot of villagers doing their thing a few still pop-upped left and right as I was riding through town.

That's more of a bug than a streaming/config issue right?

i7-5820K
980GTX
16GB
 

Seanspeed

Banned
And just in time for the Face Off.
Haha, seriously.

Anyways, wanted to say that for those with a really good setup(970 at the very least) and aren't performance snobs, I'd really look into trying to get the game running at 4k(or at least much higher than 1080p) and locking it down to 30fps. I'm not saying you *should* do this, but I think it provides an option for those wanting something more. At 4k, it is almost like the foliage gets replaced with entirely new, higher quality assets. Pretty incredible difference how much more detail you get, along with the much cleaner image obviously.

Check out this comparison I made:

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/128337
 
Has anyone else have villager's popup right around you when entering a town or village?

I rode into Crow's Perch yesterday at the slowest horse speed and although there were already a lot of villagers doing their thing a few still pop-upped left and right as I was riding through town.

That's more of a bug than a streaming/config issue right?

i7-5820K
980GTX
16GB

This sometimes happens for me and I am not sure why. I think they need to adjust some of their stream in stuff in a patch. The performance doesnt degrade when they are added on screen... the y just kinda.. pop in too lowly. If the game using more VRAM and RAM would solve that problem.. .I would gladly trade those two resources.
Haha, seriously.

Anyways, wanted to say that for those with a really good setup(970 at the very least) and aren't performance snobs, I'd really look into trying to get the game running at 4k(or at least much higher than 1080p) and locking it down to 30fps. I'm not saying you *should* do this, but I think it provides an option for those wanting something more. At 4k, it is almost like the foliage gets replaced with entirely new, higher quality assets. Pretty incredible difference how much more detail you get, along with the much cleaner image obviously.

Check out this comparison I made:

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/128337

If downsampling... an interesting thing you can do to gain performanc eis turn off Hairworks MSAA sampling. You are already getting 4 subsamples for every pixel (and not just geometric edge pixels), so it could be pretty interesting to see how it performs).
 

MisterM

Member
Installed my 970, loaded up the Witcher, left everything at high, turned on Hairworks and Ultra textures. Solid vsync'd 60fps. So good.

Goodbye 7870XT, you have served me well.
 

Seanspeed

Banned
If downsampling... an interesting thing you can do to gain performanc eis turn off Hairworks MSAA sampling. You are already getting 4 subsamples for every pixel (and not just geometric edge pixels), so it could be pretty interesting to see how it performs).
I might have to check that out. I am a performance snob so I'm happier at 60fps, better foliage/IQ be damned, but yea, that sounds interesting to try out at least.
 

GavinGT

Banned
There's something that's always bothered me with Witcher 2 and 3. It's this sort of white "screendoor" pattern that pops up sometimes as textures are fading in and out. Anyone know what this is, or what I can do to get rid of it? It's pretty distracting. I mostly notice it when I'm passing through foliage.
 

Derp

Member
Haha, seriously.

Anyways, wanted to say that for those with a really good setup(970 at the very least) and aren't performance snobs, I'd really look into trying to get the game running at 4k (or at least much higher than 1080p) and locking it down to 30 fps. I'm not saying you *should* do this, but I think it provides an option for those wanting something more. At 4k, it is almost like the foliage gets replaced with entirely new, higher quality assets. Pretty incredible difference how much more detail you get, along with the much cleaner image obviously.

Check out this comparison I made:

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/128337
This is what I've been trying to do with my 780 Ti, but I can't because Nvidia's crippled my balls. At 4k I get anywhere from 20-26 fps with hairworks off, shadows medium, foliage distance high and everything else maxed (grass density pushed further than ultra with the file tweak). I don't know what to turn down that won't effect image quality and the amount of foliage on the screen. If anyone has a way to run 4k 30 fps on a 780 Ti without killing too much of the graphics settings, please let me know.

Honestly if anyone has a rig that can do 4k, just do it and see what it looks like. It's absolutely incredible. Foliage looks SO much better and more defined.

Look forward to seeing what the driver updates are going to do for kepler. I somehow doubt there'll be much of an improvement. Definitely not more than 5 fps. They still need to cripple us a bit for sales purposes. My 4k 30 fps dream was dead from the beginning.

Edit: Were you running any sweetfx preset in those comparison shots by any chance? They look great.
 

Seanspeed

Banned
Honestly if anyone has a rig that can do 4k, just do it and see what it looks like. It's absolutely incredible. Foliage looks SO much better and more defined.
Yea, even if you don't stick with it, it's worth doing just to see it.

Edit: Were you running any sweetfx preset in those comparison shots by any chance? They look great.
Nope, vanilla TW3. It's just the specific location.
 

Enco

Member
Even with everything on low, I can't reach 60 fps.

I'm putting this on poor optimisation and not by rig (GTX 770)
 

maguskain

Member
Thought I'd post for anyone with a similar setup that wants to know about performance

i7-4770S 3.1
12gb
GTX 760 3gb

Assuming I just met the minimum specs, I played the first 3 hours on low. Everything seemed decent enough. I woke up this morning and figured what the heck, I'll try to move it to high and see what happens. Much to my surprise, I've been able to maintain 28-35 fps on high (I did turn shadows down to low). I spent about an hour playing, no crashes.
 

Seanspeed

Banned
Even with everything on low, I can't reach 60 fps.

I'm putting this on poor optimisation and not by rig (GTX 770)
I think it's just a matter of the scalability. The lower settings just don't provide the sort of reduction in quality that is going to boost your framerate considerably.

Optimization in this game seems absolutely fine.
 
I don't have access to my machine right now, but my system is:

i7 4790k
16gb 1866 DDR3
Geforce GTX 780 6gb version

Maxed out, with hairworks on, I was getting wildly fluctuating rates of 40 down to around 18 fps, with hairworks off, it averaged at about 45. Should I expect better performance than this? This is the only game I have which performs near this poorly.

I haven't had a chance to play it since release day and I havent played with the configs, so I'm not sure how much I can squeeze out of it yet.

Read the optimization guide. I'm guessing you could boost your fps by 25% by lowering some resource hog settings while keeping a similar iq. I have a 770 and get about the same framerate as you though I tailored my settings to the optimization guide.
 

MacrossD7

Neo Member
I have seen people report a similar issue to mine in prior pages of this thread wondering if anyone found a solution for it yet. I submitted my crash log to CDPR today in hopes it will lead to a permanent fix.

Upon starting a new session of the game I see red graphical errors like tiny balls flying through the screen. Often times large squares of the screen will have a purple tint flicker in and out (this sometimes happens to geralts hair). This will continue shortly until the video image freezes but the audio will continue then ultimately crash the game with a crash log.

Only way around this I have found is to change my graphic settings to low before starting a new session and see if the errors occur if not then change back to ultra and carry on. I did this yesterday and played for hours on 1.03 with no issues afterwards.

win 8.1
4770k @ 4.2
16gb
EVGA 980 2.0 acx (no overclock)
latest nvidia driver
turned off precisionx (this caused many problems)

playing at 2560x1600 with everything maxed or near maxed

apologies if this has been asked and answered already
 

Blitzhex

Member
I have seen people report a similar issue to mine in prior pages of this thread wondering if anyone found a solution for it yet. I submitted my crash log to CDPR today in hopes it will lead to a permanent fix.

Upon starting a new session of the game I see red graphical errors like tiny balls flying through the screen. Often times large squares of the screen will have a purple tint flicker in and out (this sometimes happens to geralts hair). This will continue shortly until the video image freezes but the audio will continue then ultimately crash the game with a crash log.

Only way around this I have found is to change my graphic settings to low before starting a new session and see if the errors occur if not then change back to ultra and carry on. I did this yesterday and played for hours on 1.03 with no issues afterwards.

win 8.1
4770k @ 4.2
16gb
EVGA 980 2.0 acx (no overclock)
latest nvidia driver
turned off precisionx (this caused many problems)

playing at 2560x1600 with everything maxed or near maxed

apologies if this has been asked and answered already

That's graphics artifacting, usually unstable overclocks cause it, but in your case the graphics card could be defective. Try downclocking it or increasing the power limit/voltage and try again. Could also be your psu/mobo causing your gpu to be unstable, but there's a smaller chance of that being the problem.
 

heringer

Member
So, for people messing with the ini files, any settings worth going higher than Ultra, with little performance impact and big visual impact?
 

Derp

Member
God bless you and your reshade, Drogean. This is at 4k. 20 fps :'(.....

17381809473_4fb2c2cc5d_o.png


BUYING 10 FPS! BUYING 10 FPS! ANYONE SELLING?
 

jett

D-Member
Anyone else feel this game is too dark? At night it's especially annoying. I'd rather only play during daytime.
 

StarEye

The Amiga Brotherhood
Okay, so I run a MSI GTX970 4GB now. I'm thinking of selling my GTX680 4GB and I also have a GT560ti 4GB I don't need.

Will it be worth it to use one of these two as a dedicated PhysX card? Is HairWorks part of PhysX?
 

Dries

Member
I would love to play this game in 4K, but my single 980 just isn't enough for that. I don't really care about HairWorks, but I DO want every slider at Ultra. I you really want 4K and Ultra settings I'd think you'd need at least a 980 SLI setup. Or a Titan X? All I know is my single 980 isn't enough.

Right now I'm playing at 2804 x 1577, all Ultra settings and no HairWorks on a 1440p monitor. Looks great and grants me a capped 40 fps (G-sync).
 

MacrossD7

Neo Member
That's graphics artifacting, usually unstable overclocks cause it, but in your case the graphics card could be defective. Try downclocking it or increasing the power limit/voltage and try again. Could also be your psu/mobo causing your gpu to be unstable, but there's a smaller chance of that being the problem.


I would consider it but the clues dont lead me to a hardware defect seeing how I can somehow play the game at 2560x1600 on ultra and then have zero issues for like 6+ hours after fiddling with settings and somehow making the problem go away. If this was a hardware issue then it should have presented itself again in that 6 plus hours of intensive usage.
 
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