Images taken from Durante's new amazing PC Gamer article on Witcher 3

Can anyone explain to me how is it possible for an external application to have such an impact on video game renderer? What magic is RTSS using? And if such smoothness can be had using external tools, why can't developers be arsed to implement it themselves?

Is this another example of developers being blind to their customers needs (see also: Bloom implementation last gen which nobody liked, CA implementation this gen which nobody likes)

Anything else I'm missing here. I seriously doubt CDPR shares mindset when it comes to PC development with, say "PC only, who cares?" Ubisoft...

//EDIT: Can a friendly mod change the thread title to 'Anyone can explain what kind of magic RTSS does?'

Well, there are a few things that need to be said about this:

• External tools have the luxury of not being required to work for everyone, on any setup. If e.g. TW3 doesn't work in terms of frame pacing at all on someone#s PC, they are (rightfully) pissed at CDPR. If RTSS doesn't work, though luck, they'll use something else.
• They can alo take potentially take into account external (non-game) influences better than the game itself.
• Finally, this comparison was done in a scenario where there is a few ms of performance headroom below the 33.3 required for 30 ms, consistently. It could well be that RTSS does a worse job in maintaining performance in a more borderline scenario. There's always a bit of a tradeoff between consistent frame delivery and perfromance, and RTSS clearly errs on the side of the former.

All that said, it's a great tool for framepacing in my experience.