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The Witness PC performance thread

A

Alcoholikaust

Member
New?
Graphics tweaking

Tweaking graphics settings
The Witness has a whole lot of settings under the hood that you can tweak, here's how:

First find your Local.variables file, we'll be editing it

In Library in the steam client, right click on The Witness and go to:
Properties -> LOCAL FILES -> BROWSE LOCAL FILES...
Go in into the "data" folder and open Local.variables in a text editor

There's a few things in there already, but ignore them, we'll just be adding new stuff.

Add a section for the Render Quality setting you want to edit, followed by the variables you want to set. You only need to add the variables you want to change.

Here's how it looks if you wanted to edit the high setting (the others are :/render/low and :/render/medium). These settings are the defaults for high:

:/render/high
low_res_reflections false
shadow_quality 2
sun_shadow_resolution 1024
point_shadow_resolution 1024
antialias_panel_rendering true
skip_mipmaps 0
msaa_sample_count 4
panel_render_width 512
render_width 1920
render_height 1080
dynamic_resolution false

And here's what they do:

low_res_reflections - pretty self explanitory, true or false
shadow_quality - 0, 1, or 2, the higher the better (you can try 3, but a lot of GPUs run out of texture samplers)
sun_shadow_resolution - must be one of 256, 512 or 1024
antialias_panel_rendering - true or false, improves the quality of the puzzle panels
skip_mipmaps - 0, 1, or 2, changes texture resolution THE LOWER THE BETTER
msaa_sample_count - 1, 2, 4, or 16. Higher numbers give better visuals at performance cost.
panel_render_width - must be a power of two. I wouldn't go lower than 512. 1024 is nice if you've got a top end GPU
render_width and render_height - the size of the backbuffer that's rendered to. Note that if you're using SET LAUNCH OPTIONS to set -width and -height, that'll override these.
dynamic_resolution - true or false, reduce resolution dynamically to preserve framerate at the cost of (a lot of) visual fidelity. This is really a last resort to make the game run on low-end GPUs.


Save your changes, and then run the game in the Render Quality you edited!

And finally, if you think you've broken you game, or made it worse, you can just delete everything you added and it'll go back to defaults.
Click to expand...

via The Invisibl
 
V

ViviOggi

Member
Was pretty bummed to find that sad excuse for a settings menu with no resolution options, good to see you can set up custom resolutions easily anyway.
Corpekata said:
Hope someone digs around and find advance shadow options because some of them are terrible, especially for the player character and trees.
Click to expand...
Yuuup
Adam_Roman said:
Is there a framerate cap? I'm downloading it on Steam right now.
Click to expand...
Nope it's unlocked by default
 
N

Nzyme32

Member
Not sure if anyone has frame pacing issues. I solved mine by turning off vsync. No idea why but that prevents the somewhat severe issue, and I can't see any tearing anyway. Might be an old laptop card specific issue
 
TyphoonStruggle

TyphoonStruggle

Member
Alcoholikaust said:
New?
Graphics tweaking



via The Invisibl
Click to expand...

Awesome. I got 3600x1920 to work.

fCvWy6c.png
Click to expand...
 
F

Foshy

Member
confession time

ok so i have a 1440p monitor. started out playing without tweaking anything, noticed it was running subnative, still thinking to myself how beautiful this game looks despite this

now i tried setting the resolution to 4k to downsample and it still runs absolutely fine framerate wise and everything but i honestly feel like the blurriness of upscaled 1080p helped accentuate the atmosphere and the artstyle in this case. sure it looks fucking beautiful in 4k too but i swear the blurriness adds to the mystery.

idk. i realize the reasoning is weird. absolutely not trying to start a resolution war but i wonder if anyone else feels like me too in this particular case.
 
W

Wowfunhappy

Member
Foshy said:
confession time

ok so i have a 1440p monitor. started out playing without tweaking anything, noticed it was running subnative, still thinking to myself how beautiful this game looks despite this

now i tried setting the resolution to 4k to downsample and it still runs absolutely fine framerate wise and everything but i honestly feel like the blurriness of upscaled 1080p helped accentuate the atmosphere and the artstyle in this case. sure it looks fucking beautiful in 4k too but i swear the blurriness adds to the mystery.

idk. i realize the reasoning is weird. absolutely not trying to start a resolution war but i wonder if anyone else feels like me too in this particular case.
Click to expand...

Just generally speaking, I think that (some) PC gamers get waaaay too hung up about running games at native resolutions (or higher). Yeah, native is great, but sub-native isn't always the worst thing in the world, especially if it allows you to turn up other settings.
 
Z

Zacillac

Neo Member
Really hoping I'll be able to run this at ultrawide resolution. I guess we'll see once I get home this evening...
 
B

Blizzard

Banned
Shortcut for anyone who wants the fullscreen toggle to fix vsync / smoothness / framerate, just hit alt-enter twice. That is my go-to fix when something goes janky at the moment.
 
B

Buburibon

Member
Blizzard said:
Dang, that turnaround time.

stuffj5unh.png
Click to expand...

I wasn't going to buy The Witness today because I have (currently) no time to play it. But, between the extremely positive reviews, and JB showing that he truly cares as per that one tweet, etc., I now feel absolutely compelled to purchase it before the end of the day.
 
G

GatticusFinch

Member
How is the FOV situation on 21:9 monitors? I've got an x34 and seeing all these reports of motion sickness with the locked FOV are scaring me away.
 
Wok

Wok

Member
GatticusFinch said:
How is the FOV situation on 21:9 monitors? I've got an x34 and seeing all these reports of motion sickness with the locked FOV are scaring me away.
Click to expand...

Quoting.

kavaari a écrit :
Is there any setting to change the field of view?

Yes, find your Local.variables as described above, there will already be a :/misc section at the top. Add this line:

fov_vertical 54

54 degrees is the default vertical fov; the horizontal fov is calculated from this using your screen (or window) aspect ratio.

I make no guarantees for what happens with crazy wide fov! :)
Click to expand...

http://steamcommunity.com/app/210970/discussions/3/458606877334931773/#c458606877335050768
 
Haunted

Haunted

Member
I don't even know what to think of "Use Defaults". I mean literally. I don't know what that would mean or where that would be on a scale that otherwise consists of low/medium/high.


Blizzard said:
Dang, that turnaround time.

stuffj5unh.png
Click to expand...
This is what personally going the extra mile in lieu of contracting an external QA testing department looks like. Good man, that Jonathan Blow.
 
N

Nyteshade517

Member
on the Steam forums he said they had tested the shadow issue on a 390 and it was ok...then someone posted after that they had the issue on their 390 so I don't think it's going to be a simple fix
 
A

Afro

Member
edit:still getting micro stutter when panning the camera at certain areas. also single frame drops.

edit: seemed to have fixed my G-Sync stutter
 
S

Smokey

Member
Wowfunhappy said:
Just generally speaking, I think that (some) PC gamers get waaaay too hung up about running games at native resolutions (or higher). Yeah, native is great, but sub-native isn't always the worst thing in the world, especially if it allows you to turn up other settings.
Click to expand...

Nah son

Leave that sub native mess to the consoles.
 
D

Durante

Member
Sub-native is terrible.

But I don't know why it's even being discussed in this thread. This game has arbitrary resolution support. The fact that it doesn't have a slider or combobox to select it shouldn't stop any PC gamer :p

hey_it's_that_dog said:
Will do. I know that 4K can be neatly divided by 1080p (that's probably a dumb way to say it) but if I have to pick a smaller resolution, does that resolution's mathematical relationship to 1080p have a substantial impact on the result? Or should I just try 1440p next because that's a standard resolution I keep hearing about? Sorry I'm clueless about this!
Click to expand...
Given the scaling method DSR uses (I assume that's what you are using), it doesn't really matter all that much what the ratio is.
 
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