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Witcher 3 PC Performance Thread

Vtomi80

Neo Member
That is weird, went fine for me.

Got it, I re-downloaded patch 1.08.2 from GOG, the file names are different than what I had (2.0.0.37 instead of 2.0.0.35)

Re-installed and succeded to install new game + DLC too.

It seems there was an update on patch 1.08.2 since I have installed.
 
Just installed it to my pretty new PC with Windows 10 and got a nasty "video scheduler internal error" message and restart of my PC. Happened after the nightmare and fighting the ghouls at the begining. Did a check of the game and tried again and so far no problem. Driver is up-to-date too. No trouble with Dragon Age Inquisition which I've played for hours.
 

RedSwirl

Junior Member
Is it worth trying to shimmy this game onto my 128GB SSD? Load times are starting to piss me off and I want to know if anyone has gotten significantly shorter load times on an SSD.
 

SlickVic

Member
Is it worth trying to shimmy this game onto my 128GB SSD? Load times are starting to piss me off and I want to know if anyone has gotten significantly shorter load times on an SSD.

If you can I'd highly recommend it. I've had it on SSD since day 1 and the load times seem pretty quick.
 

AlanOC91

Member
Gaf, I'm having some issues and so far asking on reddit has just been hostile.

I've started to have issues with Witcher 3 in 4k only recently. I've been playing it the last few weeks in 1080p 60fps through my TV but decided to return it to my 4k monitor today and cap it to 30 fps.

Whenever I move around be it with Geralt on the my horse the screen seems to tear and jump and cause a strange rubber band like effect. It's EXTREMELY off putting and only started happening recently (maybe since the patch?). I've played in 4k before with no issues like this so I'm not sure what the problem is.

I've recorded a video showcasing this, sorry about the phone camera but I'd like to think it can still be seen in it.

As a note, I'm running two R9 290s in CROSSFIRE but as I said before, I haven't had issues before.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgXfGyb9vy8

One clear part is on the 48th second where the bottom half tears/jumps
 
Just installed it to my pretty new PC with Windows 10 and got a nasty "video scheduler internal error" message and restart of my PC. Happened after the nightmare and fighting the ghouls at the begining. Did a check of the game and tried again and so far no problem. Driver is up-to-date too. No trouble with Dragon Age Inquisition which I've played for hours.

Happened to me as well in Novingrad several times in Win 10

I'm playing it in Win 8.1 since then with no issues. I guess we have to wait until Nvidia delivers better Win10 drivers. (yep, it's a driver issue, and I'm guessing you have a NVidia GPU)
 
QUy8tPS_XBfk.878x0.Z-Z96KYq.jpg
(thx Durante)

Does anyone know what type of graph that's called? The only time I've ever seen anything like it is in Durante's article.
 

Kezen

Banned
Gaf, I'm having some issues and so far asking on reddit has just been hostile.

I've started to have issues with Witcher 3 in 4k only recently. I've been playing it the last few weeks in 1080p 60fps through my TV but decided to return it to my 4k monitor today and cap it to 30 fps.

Whenever I move around be it with Geralt on the my horse the screen seems to tear and jump and cause a strange rubber band like effect. It's EXTREMELY off putting and only started happening recently (maybe since the patch?). I've played in 4k before with no issues like this so I'm not sure what the problem is.

I've recorded a video showcasing this, sorry about the phone camera but I'd like to think it can still be seen in it.

As a note, I'm running two R9 290s in CROSSFIRE but as I said before, I haven't had issues before.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgXfGyb9vy8

One clear part is on the 48th second where the bottom half tears/jumps

Driver issues probably. Something in the code must have not played well with them.
 

AlanOC91

Member
Driver issues probably. Something in the code must have not played well with them.

Yeah I won't deny it's possible.

But does it make sense that it now only occurs in 4k (and only recently too, no drivers update from when it worked fine to now)? 1080p and 1440p show absolutely no signs of this issue for me :/

When I move my res to 4k and start moving around it jumps all over the place but my fps remains the same .
 

Kezen

Banned
Yeah I won't deny it's possible.

But does it make sense that it now only occurs in 4k (and only recently too, no drivers update from when it worked fine to now)? 1080p and 1440p show absolutely no signs of this issue for me :/

When I move my res to 4k and start moving around it jumps all over the place but my fps remains the same .

Yes it makes sense. Drivers can exhibit issues depending on settings used, nothing unusual about that.
 
Yeah, at 60FPS most modern (and especially overclocked) Intel CPU's with 2500K performance and above won't be a bottleneck. There's of course exceptions like MMO's, but most games will mostly be capped by GPU performance.

If you are aiming for 120FPS though there is definitely a difference with the newer ones, not huge or anything but it's there.
YkaUzTA.png

Where is that table from?
 

Dries

Member
Gaf, I'm having some issues and so far asking on reddit has just been hostile.

I've started to have issues with Witcher 3 in 4k only recently. I've been playing it the last few weeks in 1080p 60fps through my TV but decided to return it to my 4k monitor today and cap it to 30 fps.

Whenever I move around be it with Geralt on the my horse the screen seems to tear and jump and cause a strange rubber band like effect. It's EXTREMELY off putting and only started happening recently (maybe since the patch?). I've played in 4k before with no issues like this so I'm not sure what the problem is.

I've recorded a video showcasing this, sorry about the phone camera but I'd like to think it can still be seen in it.

As a note, I'm running two R9 290s in CROSSFIRE but as I said before, I haven't had issues before.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgXfGyb9vy8

One clear part is on the 48th second where the bottom half tears/jumps

I don't know for sure, but could it be that your GPU memory is being choked? Try capping at 20 fps (just for benchmarking reasons) to lower your GPU and memory usage and test to see if the stuttering still occurs. 4K may be just too demanding.
 

AlanOC91

Member
I don't know for sure, but could it be that your GPU memory is being choked? Try capping at 20 fps (just for benchmarking reasons) to lower your GPU and memory usage and test to see if the stuttering still occurs. 4K may be just too demanding.

It's always possible! But what confuses me is that I've put at least 10 hours into this at 4k without any of these issues before.
 

Flandy

Member
Is it possible to play with an overclocked 970? I remember back at launch if you tried to play with an OC you'd get a crash
 

Spinifex

Member
Gaf, I'm having some issues and so far asking on reddit has just been hostile.

I've started to have issues with Witcher 3 in 4k only recently. I've been playing it the last few weeks in 1080p 60fps through my TV but decided to return it to my 4k monitor today and cap it to 30 fps.

Whenever I move around be it with Geralt on the my horse the screen seems to tear and jump and cause a strange rubber band like effect. It's EXTREMELY off putting and only started happening recently (maybe since the patch?). I've played in 4k before with no issues like this so I'm not sure what the problem is.

I've recorded a video showcasing this, sorry about the phone camera but I'd like to think it can still be seen in it.

As a note, I'm running two R9 290s in CROSSFIRE but as I said before, I haven't had issues before.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgXfGyb9vy8

One clear part is on the 48th second where the bottom half tears/jumps

I recommend uninstalling drivers with DDU and clean installing 15.7.1

Windows update is pushing out GPU updates that just seem to screw with things. For example with the WU driver freesync just doesn't work at all for me. With a clean install of 15.7.1 everything is awesome.

They really need to fix this update fuckery.
 

AlanOC91

Member
I recommend uninstalling drivers with DDU and clean installing 15.7.1

Windows update is pushing out GPU updates that just seem to screw with things. For example with the WU driver freesync just doesn't work at all for me. With a clean install of 15.7.1 everything is awesome.

They really need to fix this update fuckery.

Thanks! I'll give it a go and see if it fixes anything for me!
 
Recently completely lost my light attack sound effect. Instead of a slash, there's just a dull thud or nothing at all. Gonna try verifying local files
 
Just updated to Windows 10 and now I'm getting these strange blue lines run across the screen periodically as well as flashes of black screen... I've literally had no problems with W7, this is my first test of Win10 and it's not good. Any ideas?
 
Just updated to Windows 10 and now I'm getting these strange blue lines run across the screen periodically as well as flashes of black screen... I've literally had no problems with W7, this is my first test of Win10 and it's not good. Any ideas?

Do a clean driver reinstall. Witches 3 runs fine for me on Windows 10. And if you have Steam be sure to verify the integrity of the cache(or whatever GOG's equivalent is) as Steam didn't download the latest patch automatically for me and was causing a few issues with some of the mods I had installed until it downloaded the last update.
But your problem sounds like a driver issue to me.
 

BraXzy

Member
Life. When I first got W3, I tweaked the hell out of the settings to get the absolute best visuals to FPS ratio on my GTX 670 because I'm weird for straining the most I can before it has terrible FPS.

Stopped playing the game after a few hours due to having no time, finally get round to jumping back in and realise that I had to wipe my computer and reinstall Windows so all my tweaks are lost into the ether :'(
 

Coreda

Member
I'm finding that changing the resolution to lower than native (eg: 1920x1080 on a 2560x1440p monitor) isn't scaling the image to fit the monitor.

The Nvidia control panel is set to GPU scaling as aspect ratio, and the override checkbox is enabled. It's not a problem for other games so I'm not sure what I need to change.

Any ideas?
 
I'm finding that changing the resolution to lower than native (eg: 1920x1080 on a 2560x1440p monitor) isn't scaling the image to fit the monitor.

The Nvidia control panel is set to GPU scaling as aspect ratio, and the override checkbox is enabled. It's not a problem for other games so I'm not sure what I need to change.

Any ideas?

Are you full screen or full screen window ? (borderless)
 

K' Dash

Member
I know this thrad is kinda dead but I want to post my experience and settings:

i5 2500K @ 4.2GHz
Gigabyte 780 GHz Edition
8GB RAM

Playing everything on ultra except shadows wich is on high and AO wich is on SSAO with hair works on, 1080p getting 30fps solid, rarely drops.

Amazing game.
 
D

Deleted member 325805

Unconfirmed Member
Is it just me or do some cut scenes really tank the frame rate? I get 60fps without dips during combat but these damn cut scenes can drop me into the 40s for no apparent reason.

Big story spoiler:

It's especially bad during the battle of Kaer Morhen, and it's really running this awesome quest for me.
 
D

Deleted member 325805

Unconfirmed Member
And I'm getting weird FPS drops even with everything off or on low, restarting the game usually fixes it, but not this time. No idea what's up with it, maybe a Windows 10 thing as I previously played the game on 8.1.
 
And I'm getting weird FPS drops even with everything off or on low, restarting the game usually fixes it, but not this time. No idea what's up with it, maybe a Windows 10 thing as I previously played the game on 8.1.

I find the game sometimes switches to borderless windowed mode sometime even if fullscreen is selected. If I switch the setting to borderless windowed back to fullscreen it takes. Maybe that is it?

For me borderless window mode stutters terribly.
 
D

Deleted member 325805

Unconfirmed Member
I find the game sometimes switches to borderless windowed mode sometime even if fullscreen is selected. If I switch the setting to borderless windowed back to fullscreen it takes. Maybe that is it?

For me borderless window mode stutters terribly.

For some reason VSync doesn't work in fullscreen so I've been using borderless window as I can't handle tearing. I would really like to get on top of this issue as it's really hurting the game for me. I just want stable 60fps without dips, and no weird drops that require me to restart.

I've checked my CPU and GPU temps and they're fine, so it's not that at least. I've always wondered if using such an old sound card hurts me, I'm currently using the XFI XtremeGamer which is nearly 10 years old, I've been thinking about grabbing an Audigy FX which is much newer at 1.5 years, and it's only £20.
 
D

Deleted member 325805

Unconfirmed Member
I've tried reseting my bios, reinstalling the game and reinstalling my drivers with DDU and nothing has helped. The game can work perfectly for an hour or more and then before my eyes it'll turn into a hitching mess that constantly drops frames, restarting the game fixes it but for only a few minutes. I don't know if it's the game, Windows 10, Nvidia drivers or my hardware and I'm totally lost and depressed, I'm near the end of the game but it's a constant ballache trying to play it like this.

I made a video showing the issue, please watch in 60fps, and note the video doesn't do the issue justice, it's worse in-game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKB32yybRnM
 

Shumafuk

Member
I don't know, what is wrong, but I have really bad performance during 4K rendering (for screenshoting). I have about 1-2 FPS on my GTX960. Which is wired, because I remember that I was able to render about 10 FPS on GTX660. Since then I change a lot things, so I don't know what exactly could make this performace hit. In 1080p I have stable 30FPS (on same graphic setting).

I use ReShade, DebugConsole and v-sync, AA, pre-render 1 frame in Nvidia Drivers...

Is it normal to have 1-2 FPS on 4K rendering? I don't think so.
 
I don't know, what is wrong, but I have really bad performance during 4K rendering (for screenshoting). I have about 1-2 FPS on my GTX960. Which is wired, because I remember that I was able to render about 10 FPS on GTX660. Since then I change a lot things, so I don't know what exactly could make this performace hit. In 1080p I have stable 30FPS (on same graphic setting).

I use ReShade, DebugConsole and v-sync, AA, pre-render 1 frame in Nvidia Drivers...

Is it normal to have 1-2 FPS on 4K rendering? I don't think so.

Can happen when you run out of VRAM. Maybe you played with less VRAM intensive settings on your GTX 660?
 
D

Deleted member 325805

Unconfirmed Member
Day 6 in my troubleshooting quest, I thought I had fixed it today as the game was running fine for 10 hours, but I just came back to check on it and it was back to being a hitching mess again. I just don't know what's wrong, if I knew it was the game I could relax and stop spending every waking minute trying to fix it, but I don't.
 

Kezen

Banned
I don't know, what is wrong, but I have really bad performance during 4K rendering (for screenshoting). I have about 1-2 FPS on my GTX960. Which is wired, because I remember that I was able to render about 10 FPS on GTX660. Since then I change a lot things, so I don't know what exactly could make this performace hit. In 1080p I have stable 30FPS (on same graphic setting).

I use ReShade, DebugConsole and v-sync, AA, pre-render 1 frame in Nvidia Drivers...

Is it normal to have 1-2 FPS on 4K rendering? I don't think so.

Reshade and debugconsole can have unintended side effects. Try running the game without those. And at 4K I'm not certain 2gb is enough, the game asks for about 1.9gb at 1080p.
 

Diablos

Member
This game runs like crap on my FX6300/GTX 660 rig. I am not surprised though. Even Medium sucks. I'm so pissed. Always dipping below 30fps...

Might have to ask Steam for a refund. Not sure if I want a new GPU right now.
 
Reshade and debugconsole can have unintended side effects. Try running the game without those. And at 4K I'm not certain 2gb is enough, the game asks for about 1.9gb at 1080p.

4k uses about 3.2-4.5 Gb of VRAM. 2 would definitely stutter and constantly disk scratch
 
Day 6 in my troubleshooting quest, I thought I had fixed it today as the game was running fine for 10 hours, but I just came back to check on it and it was back to being a hitching mess again. I just don't know what's wrong, if I knew it was the game I could relax and stop spending every waking minute trying to fix it, but I don't.

You said you use borderless windowed mode because you can't seem to get vsync to work in fullscreen mode. I can tell, you in my experience, borderless windowed mode is not smooth for me at all. If it was me, I'd try to figure out why vsync isn't working in fullscreen mode.
 

Kezen

Banned
4k uses about 3.2-4.5 Gb of VRAM. 2 would definitely stutter and constantly disk scratch

Wow I was not expecting that much, but it's very good that the game uses as much VRAM as possible for smooth gameplay. I don't get it when some complain that their VRAM is maxed.
 
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Deleted member 325805

Unconfirmed Member
You said you use borderless windowed mode because you can't seem to get vsync to work in fullscreen mode. I can tell, you in my experience, borderless windowed mode is not smooth for me at all. If it was me, I'd try to figure out why vsync isn't working in fullscreen mode.

I got it to work in fullscreen in the end, and when you say borderless isn't smooth do you mean all the time? Because it worked perfectly for me yesterday for 10 hours as I said, then went to shit. What I'm doing now is running one game a day, if no other game has this issue I can rule out my PC. It could be a memory leak that takes a long time to show itself, which is maybe why it's not heavily reported as most people aren't playing for such long sessions without closing the game. Counter Strike has been running for 10 hours thus far without issue so fingers crossed, it's going to take about a week to troubleshoot like this, but over the last 6 days I've tried literally everything I can think of, plus everything others on multiple tech forums have suggested.
 
I got it to work in fullscreen in the end, and when you say borderless isn't smooth do you mean all the time? Because it worked perfectly for me yesterday for 10 hours as I said, then went to shit. What I'm doing now is running one game a day, if no other game has this issue I can rule out my PC. It could be a memory leak that takes a long time to show itself, which is maybe why it's not heavily reported as most people aren't playing for such long sessions without closing the game. Counter Strike has been running for 10 hours thus far without issue so fingers crossed, it's going to take about a week to troubleshoot like this, but over the last 6 days I've tried literally everything I can think of, plus everything others on multiple tech forums have suggested.

For me, borderless window mode is immediately terrible. Sometimes the game just switches to it when I launch it and the moment the game loads, I don't even have to move, I know that it happened because it's stutters noticeably. I change back to fullscreen and it smooths out, immediately. Now this may be related to the fact that I'm using Gsync so I'm not sure how it behaves otherwise. As for playing for 10 hours straight, no I have never played a session anywhere near that long. Maybe 4 hours at the longest in a single sitting.
 
For me, borderless window mode is immediately terrible. Sometimes the game just switches to it when I launch it and the moment the game loads, I don't even have to move, I know that it happened because it's stutters noticeably. I change back to fullscreen and it smooths out, immediately. Now this may be related to the fact that I'm using Gsync so I'm not sure how it behaves otherwise. As for playing for 10 hours straight, no I have never played a session anywhere near that long. Maybe 4 hours at the longest in a single sitting.

I do not have GSync and my experience with Borderless Window is exactly the same with you.
 
D

Deleted member 325805

Unconfirmed Member
For me, borderless window mode is immediately terrible. Sometimes the game just switches to it when I launch it and the moment the game loads, I don't even have to move, I know that it happened because it's stutters noticeably. I change back to fullscreen and it smooths out, immediately. Now this may be related to the fact that I'm using Gsync so I'm not sure how it behaves otherwise. As for playing for 10 hours straight, no I have never played a session anywhere near that long. Maybe 4 hours at the longest in a single sitting.

The problem usually kicks in between 1 - 3 hours, 10 hours is just my record before the game goes to shit. Counter Strike made it to 16 hours without symptoms, now I'm running Dying Light. I will do the same for Mad Max, Dota 2 and a 5th game. If all 5 games make it to 15 hours symptom free I'm going to stop troubleshooting and chalk it up to a game issue, report my findings to CDPR and hope for a patch.
 

Eyothrie

Member
So I have this weird microstutter that is randomly happening pretty frequently, every couple minutes. To make it stop, all I have to do is go into the menu and then exit the menu, but I don't want to keep doing this. Any idea how to correct? I've played around with the max pre-rendered frames ("1", "2", "application controlled"), but none of these settings gets rid of it. It's not a dealbreaker, but it's very annoying. FPS counter stays at 60 the entire time, but the microstutter is really apparent when it occurs. It's very "jittery" looking when panning the camera for lack of a better way to explain it. This is the only game that does this.

gtx 970 ssc
i7 3820 @ 4.3
16 gb ram
 

Knurek

Member
Meh, even despite switching to 970, I can't seem to hit 1080p60, no matter the setting I use.
I can have Ultra on 1080p30 with some minor frametime variance (or none with Hairworks disabled), but I'm getting massive stutter when I unlock the framerate.
I guess my i3-3250 is the limiting factor here.
Oh well, can't say the game looks bad as it is. More fluidness 60fps provides would be appreciated though.

A bit more info if anyone runs into the same problem - I got the game to run at fluid 1080p60 High even on i3 just by disabling Aero and Desktop compositions.
Not sure why this would cause such performance hit - I honestly thought Aero was cost free on anything better than Intel IGPUs.
 
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