The Witcher 2: Enhanced Edition Performance & IQ Review @ [H]

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FrgMstr

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The Witcher 2: Enhanced Edition Performance & IQ Review - The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings just underwent a major update. The Enhanced Edition offers a new zone, more quests, more cinematics, and several bug fixes. This DX9 game has the reputation of being one of the most demanding and stressful games on modern video cards. We put this theory to the test.
 
I've had those cutscene dips on both my 7970 and on two 6970s. The culprit seems to be cinematic depth of field, which, if disabled, makes the problem go away entirely. Irritating, but not a huge IQ loss thankfully.
 
This game is mostly just really poorly optimized. It makes it good for benchmarking, but there's no reason it needs to run as shitty as it does.
 
Cmdrmonkey said:
This game is mostly just really poorly optimized. It makes it good for benchmarking, but there's no reason it needs to run as shitty as it does.
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Please share some evidence to back up your opinions, thanks.
 
I play it fine on an old 5850 at 1080p. I just turn off DoF, blur and ubersampling. The game is quite fun.
 
We did make a few changes which include turning off both Vertical Sync and increasing LOD Distance from Near up to FarWe did make a few changes which include turning off both Vertical Sync and increasing LOD Distance from Near up to Far
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Did adaptive Vsync did any difference?
 
Thanks a lot for this review. I really enjoyed reading it. I'm currently playing this game and I'm loving it so far, currently nearing the end of chapter 1.

===

By the way, it's also possible to change some values of this game in the config text file. Usually found in My Documents/Witcher 2/config/User.txt. There you can change some settings that go beyond what the "Ultra" setting allows and push the engine even further.

The LOD settings (FoliageDistanceScale/MeshDistanceScale) for example is 1.0 on Ultra, but can be pushed to for example 4.8 or even higher. Or for example increasing the Shadow detail even higher than what Ultra normally allows.

I've been trying out some of the settings thanks to this thread, and the game looks even more beautiful than it already does.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/gam...0627-witcher-2-performance-issues-solved.html

===

Originally Posted by Cmdrmonkey
This game is mostly just really poorly optimized. It makes it good for benchmarking, but there's no reason it needs to run as shitty as it does.
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I'm sorry, but I don't agree. This game offers beautiful and very good graphics, I think the requirements and trade-off in performance are a very reasonable price for what it offers.
 
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I think his points were there are games in same genre that look better but don't have the performance penalty. AoC is one that comes to mind and that came out like 4 years ago.
 
Just finished playing it last night. Outstanding game. I'll definitely play through again as I didn't do many of the side quests this time through. It ran great on my rig, no problems.
 
Please include it in your future tests, we really miss demanding games in your reviews, and really i don't understand why you guys removed Metro 2033 and Crysis from the video cards reviews.
 
psyside said:
Please include it in your future tests, we really miss demanding games in your reviews, and really i don't understand why you guys removed Metro 2033 and Crysis from the video cards reviews.
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Because those two titles are very old and not played much anymore. Using games for testing that one one is playing is about as useful as using benchmarks that nobody plays.
 
With the 7950,7870,and GTX580 why was there no advantage for the 7950? It could play with Far settings as opposed to near....Shouldnt that be listed as an advantage?
 
A minor edit point - on tab 4 in the "AMD Radeon HD 7950 vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 vs AMD Radeon HD 7870" section, the first sentence immediately following the first graph begins with:

"The AMD Radeon HD 7950, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680, and the AMD Radeon HD 7870 all struggled ..."

I believe the reference should be to the GTX 580.

I haven't played the Witcher 2, but I enjoy reading the review.
 
I have an i7 2600k @ 4.4GHz and GTX580 SLI setup with 16GB of ram. I cannot run @ 1920x1200 with ubersampling and all settings at max. It drops the FPS into the teens.
 
Good review. I'm going to have to dust off my copy and give the new eye candy a whirl.


Spelling fixed, thanks for the extra eyes. - Kyle
 
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gordon151 said:
I think his points were there are games in same genre that look better but don't have the performance penalty. AoC is one that comes to mind and that came out like 4 years ago.
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Age of Conan? That game doesn't look anywhere near as good as The Witcher 2 and it ran like shit at release.
 
It's a great game, and I noticed the same think you did in the benchmarks. While you can stress the hell out of your video card with the higher settings, visually the middle of the road settings aren't much different from "ultra" with the one exception of ubersampling.
 
my hybrid crossfire set up with an a8 3850 and a radeon 6670 can play the enhanced edtion @ 1920x1200, with some of the graphics options dumbed down a touch, game still looks amazing.


It really is a great game that was the perfect follow up to the first one, which was also amazing for it's time.
 
Whisperfang said:
I have an i7 2600k @ 4.4GHz and GTX580 SLI setup with 16GB of ram. I cannot run @ 1920x1200 with ubersampling and all settings at max. It drops the FPS into the teens.
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Yup its absolutely brutal.
I have found that forcing AF can have quite the hit on fps and the game responds really well to unparking my cpu cores. I also prefer forcing vsync+tb via d3doverrider for the nest iq/smoothness.
 
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Just like to chime in and say that this game was and still is one of most visually impressive games I've ever played. The fact that the visuals all "match" together puts it over Battlefield 3, which has an incredibly disjointed look, at least in my eyes.

Wish the 3rd act was longer though, waaaay too short.
 
lilbabycat said:
Just like to chime in and say that this game was and still is one of most visually impressive games I've ever played. The fact that the visuals all "match" together puts it over Battlefield 3, which has an incredibly disjointed look, at least in my eyes.

Wish the 3rd act was longer though, waaaay too short.
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I haven't played that far yet, but I believe the Enhanced Edition is supposed to remedy that a little bit.
 
lilbabycat said:
Just like to chime in and say that this game was and still is one of most visually impressive games I've ever played. The fact that the visuals all "match" together puts it over Battlefield 3, which has an incredibly disjointed look, at least in my eyes.

Wish the 3rd act was longer though, waaaay too short.
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I felt the same way about the 3rd act but apparently that's specifically where they added extra quests and gameplay. I play at high setting preset with not really changing anything with my x4 at stocks speeds and 6870. I wonder if I can turn on 16x af in ccc and see if there is no big performance hit. So, were you able to turn on ubersampling with teh 7970 and 680 at 1900 x 1200?
 
Surprised by the relatively poor performance of these high end cards. I thought the game ran well on my old GTX460 and Phenom II at high settings. Of course I wasn't using AA and played at just 1680x1050, maybe higher resolutions and FSAA hit the framerate quite hard with this game.
 
JimmiG said:
Surprised by the relatively poor performance of these high end cards. I thought the game ran well on my old GTX460 and Phenom II at high settings. Of course I wasn't using AA and played at just 1680x1050, maybe higher resolutions and FSAA hit the framerate quite hard with this game.
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1680x1050 = 1,764,000 pixels

2560x1600 = 4,096,000 pixels

Quite a bit of difference from that perspective alone. :D
 
Killer review, awesome to see the graphics options of notoriety (AF, LOD, uber) examined up close. My favorite bit had to be the ubersampling IQ comparison. That's a huge noticeable difference. Great read.
 
Great game, hope more [H] readers discover it because of the article. Played through the prologue and first chunk of act 1 but decided to wait until I upgrade my system to complete the game as it deserves to run at high+ settings.
 
The 5.4% faster performance the Radeon HD 7970 experienced did not make any noticeable improvements in gameplay.
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I really like seeing comments like this, especially in "game performance" reviews. In my experience, 10% is the minimum threshold for discerning a difference in play, and depending on the game, frame rates might have to exceed a 15% or even a 20% difference before it's perceivable by the player. How often it is that we see sites graphing a 2% frame-rate advantage as if it's critically important...:confused: Sometimes, even, as it happens here, a benchmark can demonstrate a lower frame rate for a product that provides a better in-game experience. Frame-rate benchmarks might well be "objective" (assuming one IHV or the other isn't cheating), but the main problem is that they don't tell us very much that's really useful.

Thanks for the AF tip, too--I've been playing this game on and off for a year now, and for some reason I only noticed I should be using the CCC to set AF when you said something about it here! I'm entering the border territories of Alzheimer's country, I guess...:p
 
Cmdrmonkey said:
This game is mostly just really poorly optimized. It makes it good for benchmarking, but there's no reason it needs to run as shitty as it does.
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Bollocks. Witcher 2 is propably best looking DX9 game out there, and runs fine with highish settings even on midrange cards. Only thing that truly kills the performance is Ubersampling, which is AFAIK a form of Supersampling AA so no wonder it drops any rig on their knees. No amount of optimising is going to help that.
 
MaZa said:
Bollocks. Witcher 2 is propably best looking DX9 game out there, and runs fine with highish settings even on midrange cards. Only thing that truly kills the performance is Ubersampling, which is AFAIK a form of Supersampling AA so no wonder it drops any rig on their knees. No amount of optimising is going to help that.
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Ubersampling is akin to 4X SSAA.
 
So the only setup that might run ubersampling is a Quad GTX 680 setup or equivalent?
 
I picked up this game shortly after getting my 7970. I'm glad I didn't play it until then. I basically ran Ultra with ubersampling off (1080p) and it was awesome.

Great game and great graphics. Highly recommended if you haven't played it.

Glad to see the [H] giving it it's recognition.
 
Also is there a reason you used normal resampling methods for the zoomed in images? I liked how you used to use point resize for a clearer image without image scaling effects.
 
Crest said:
People don't play Metro or Crysis? Provide evidence to back up your opinions. :p

Still, BF3 is probably the most demanding thing you run, which is fine. But you need atleast one game that is always mostly impossible to run. And if a single card can max out that game, then wheres the fun in that. :[
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add me to that list of people that don't play either games nor want to see tests of either games anymore. metro 2033 has no replay value so even if they magically found a setup that plays it at 60fps constant completely maxed out with supersampling i still wouldn't go back and play the game again, and crysis is just crap.



back on topic.. should be interesting to see what SLI/cfx or triple/quad sli/cfx could do in this game. :D do you guys plan on maybe messing with the cfg file like another poster further up in this thread mentioned see if you can actually push the quality higher than what the preset numbers are?
 
This game is definitely an outstanding one I've thoroughly enjoyed and it deserves all the praise it gets. However, it seems to me that the game was designed from the off with an eventual console port in mind as I remember thinking that as soon as I loaded it up last year and noticed that the graphics options where OUTSIDE of the game in a launcher (the first game included them as an option in the main menu, at least in the Enhanced Edition I played) which makes changing the settings a chore. Other PC games manage to include in-game options but external ones tend to be found in multiformat ones more often than not. Also, this game had full support for the Xbox 360 controller, again unusual for a PC-only (at-the-time) game but most welcome as that is how I played the game. I'm not accusing this game of being rubbish because the Xbox 360 version was likely planned ahead, you understand, just saying that there were clear signs from launch that it was built with a later console port in mind.

P.S. I played right through this game from start to finish on my GTX 580 with my CPU clocked at 3.6 GHz, in other words similar to this article, and had no performance issues at Ultra settings, 1920x1200, AA on, Draw Distance set to Far and the two hidden settings set to 2.4. In fact, it seems that the Enhanced Edition has poorer performing Cinematic DOF IMO as even on my new GTX 680 it can not only dip to 25 fps during cutscenes (on the same settings as above) but also looks worst. I suspect this may either be a driver bug in the 300 series drivers or a bug with the EE engine. Anyone else noticed this?
 
I preferred the combat of the first Witcher but love everything about the second more than the first. It deserves a spot on the [H] graphics test list for sure.
 
I have a 2600K @ 4800 MHZ and 3 7970s in tri-Fire and still cant run Ubersampling, Why is it implemented at all, Its not like the devolpers could even test ubersampling at acceptable frame rates. What a Joke LOL.
 
great game.

People say oh its only dx9, this dx9 game has great graphics. Certainly one of the best looking games currently available.

Ubersamping, eh its not needed it does improve image quality a good bit. Even with 7870's in crossfire I cannot turn this option on at 1080p. Well i take that back i can turn it on, just performance sucks lol.

Like hardocp noted, this game doesn't really feel smooth unless your over 40 or so FPS.

I am on my 3rd play through now, 1st play through with the enhanced edition. I like how the choices you make change the play through completely.
 
Isn't the most impressive thing about this game is that it is 100% DRM free, if you don't get the steam version, and get it direct from CD Projekt's store? (GOG.com)

No damn offline mode needed!
No damn hassles!
They actually LIKE their customers!

This should have been made more clear for those that don't know.
 
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