Witcher 3 Performance Discussion

Dropping the Ambient Occlusion from HBAO+ to SSAO should give a healthy performance boost without any noticeable quality impact too. With everything maxed out, single Titan X simply can't keep up (fps around 30, min 25). With SSAO, AA disable, HairWorks off, a single Titan X can handle the game at 2160p just fine (fps ~ 40-50, min 3x)
 
David-Duc said:
Dropping the Ambient Occlusion from HBAO+ to SSAO should give a healthy performance boost without any noticeable quality impact too. With everything maxed out, single Titan X simply can't keep up (fps around 30, min 25). With SSAO, AA disable, HairWorks off, a single Titan X can handle the game at 2160p just fine (fps ~ 40-50, min 3x)
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Is that on Ultra? How about high? 60fps high with AA off and Hairworks off possible?
 
runs perfect on my rig just hairworks off, everything else max at 1080p
hairworks makes it unplayable though
 
David-Duc said:
Dropping the Ambient Occlusion from HBAO+ to SSAO should give a healthy performance boost without any noticeable quality impact too. With everything maxed out, single Titan X simply can't keep up (fps around 30, min 25). With SSAO, AA disable, HairWorks off, a single Titan X can handle the game at 2160p just fine (fps ~ 40-50, min 3x)
Click to expand...

I'm only seeing a difference of 2 FPS with SSAO vs. HBAO+, so i'm using HBAO+.

The games run in the 40-50+ FPS range @ 1080p w/ULTRA settings and with no Hairworks enabled - with an Overclocked GTX 780. Recording with ShadowPlay

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahL3B6MDtXQ
 
while playing through the game .. i've noticed hairworks working great on the animals/monsters/furs and some beards... but terrible on hair... reminds me of tomb raider all over again where a bundle of spaghetti tied on one end moving around... lol ... maybe its just me...
 
a3venom said:
Same story here,
does anyone think that upgrading from i3 to 4770k will give me even 5 fps boost?
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Yes i say a good 10 Fps for sure. i'm looking at getting the same fps boost next month when i swap out my i5 2400 for a either an i7 2600k or 3770k(@4-4.2 ghz) i figure i'll get a good 10fps across the board.
 
anybody playing this with an crossfire setup?
If so, how's your fps?

It's a flicker fest for me and i'm getting around 40-55 on everything high without no SSAO, AA, and hairwork. Weird that i'm only using about 2.5gb of vram and about 6gb of ram. Hoping new driver could help with fps and cfx utilization.
 
Sieg said:
anybody playing this with an crossfire setup?
If so, how's your fps?

It's a flicker fest for me and i'm getting around 40-55 on everything high without no SSAO, AA, and hairwork. Weird that i'm only using about 2.5gb of vram and about 6gb of ram. Hoping new driver could help with fps and cfx utilization.
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what res is that?
 
Sieg said:
anybody playing this with an crossfire setup?
If so, how's your fps?

It's a flicker fest for me and i'm getting around 40-55 on everything high without no SSAO, AA, and hairwork. Weird that i'm only using about 2.5gb of vram and about 6gb of ram. Hoping new driver could help with fps and cfx utilization.
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Crossfire is broken until a driver or patch says otherwise. Disable it.

My settings

1440 res
Everything ultra, except foliage distance set to high and shadows to low
Post process -- All off except AA and SSAO
Hairworks on, 8x tesselation forced in control panel - Minimal quality difference in screenshots and none during gameplay

I get 40-50fps but have the game capped at 30 until crossfire works. Single card only right now, stock 290 Tri-X clocks.
 
My brother swears crossfire is working on his 7970's playing witcher 3.
I told him online that I read it was broken, but he wouldn't have it. Said it plays excellent for him and both his GPUs are running 90%+ usage.
 
a3venom said:
what res is that?
Click to expand...
3440x1440

CF usage for me is around 35-75% alternating between two card. I guess I'll have to suck it up and drop it down to medium to get constant 60 fps. I also did the CCC trick too and only loss about 3 fps on 8x.
 
DraginDime said:
My brother swears crossfire is working on his 7970's playing witcher 3.
I told him online that I read it was broken, but he wouldn't have it. Said it plays excellent for him and both his GPUs are running 90%+ usage.
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Yeah, he's full of it. My friend and I tested it extensively, it doesn't work with current drivers.
 
MaZa said:
0 and x2 look bit noisy but x4 looks acceptable with less performance hit than the default 8. Still, my GTX770 is not enough for it. 35-44fps average is too low for me.
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Did you change AA in Nvidia's control panel, or played around with the cfg file?

Whenever possible, I'd like to choose 4x AA over 8x AA, as it is good enough for me.
 
i found turning off AA and using super resolution worked better
 
for what it's worth, i got a massive performance increase from the patch with 2x 780tis...

1440p

before:
everything ultra except high for shadows and foliage, no hair or blur = 45-50fps consistently.

now:
everything ultra, high for only foliage, hair and blur ON = 63 fps consistently.

i also turned hair back off under new conditions... 80-85 fps.

insane increase.

newest drivers for all tests, before and after, btw.

... i want to be happy but im sort of scratching my head wondering how this can be.
 
They probably tuned HairWorks settings for varying GPU performance capabilities. Maybe it doesn't use insane tessellation levels on GPUs with lower tessellation capabilities.
 
Try changing hairworks aa to 0 in ini. Use sweetfx to inject smaa or run fxaa or mfaa injection and trun off aa. Drop to ssao. Drop shadow to low. Those should help. Foliage to high if you need more fps.

This i feel gives me hairworks with nvidia. Decent aa. Good foliage at ultra. Good colors with sweetfx. And 1080 should hit 60 fps with something like 980? Maybe. Mine is at 50 fps but much higher resolution
 
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lee0539 said:
Try changing hairworks aa to 0 in ini. Use sweetfx to inject smaa or run fxaa or mfaa injection and trun off aa. Drop to ssao. Drop shadow to low. Those should help. Foliage to high if you need more fps.

This i feel gives me hairworks with nvidia. Decent aa. Good foliage at ultra. Good colors with sweetfx. And 1080 should hit 60 fps with something like 980? Maybe. Mine is at 50 fps but much higher resolution
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Wat's the line in the ini file for hairworks AA?
 
phorkz said:
Wat's the line in the ini file for hairworks AA?
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/witcher 3 wild hunt/bin/config/base/rendering.ini
open with notepad or watever

change following line
UseHairWorks=true
HairWorksAALevel=0 or 2 if you want some AA (although it still hurts your fps a bit)

then change it to read only
 
lee0539 said:
/witcher 3 wild hunt/bin/config/base/rendering.ini
open with notepad or watever

change following line
UseHairWorks=true
HairWorksAALevel=0 or 2 if you want some AA (although it still hurts your fps a bit)

then change it to read only
Click to expand...

thank you kind sir
 
Game is working great on one GTX 980 and a 4930k @ 4.65ghz. Only issues arise when I alt-tab and it crashes 20% of the time. Windowed Borderless causes in-game graphical glitches. Otherwise I'm having a blast and I've put in about 17 hours so far.
 
I don't suggest lowering hairworks aa below 4x. Anything lower causes some noticeable shittiness of the hair strands.
 
Latest patch pushes my GPU so hard I had to reduce my overclock (GTX980 @ 1570, now down to 1500)
But it runs smoother even though it shows the exact same framerate (at or just under 60fps).

I was suffering some serious "game" crashes before this patch, will play again later and see if it has improved.
Only crash I have had with patch 1.03 so far is an NVidia driver crash from being pushed harder which stopped when I backed off the overclock.
Spose I could have turned the fan up :)
 
i think they did something to hairyworks.

im getting mid 50s all ultra tess at 8x single 290 pro.

i may actually turn tess up.
 
I finally got DSR working and its a great solution at 1080p.
With a res of 2352x1323, all AA turned off - that includes hairworks set to 0xAA, it looks great and is super smooth.
With 2560x1440 I couldnt keep 60fps all the time but with the next lower res it does.
It really does look higher res.

Find which res works best for your settings to maintain high framerate, its worth a try.
While setting it up, I had what looked like a lockup that lasted 75 seconds while the driver/game got its knickers in a twist.
So if it appears to be locked up solid, just leave it for a couple of minutes.

Oh yes.
Set it to full screen first because "bordered" only displays part of the screen in the centre.
This is a pita if you set 4K res cos you cant see the menus!

ps
if DSR doesnt activate or even shafts the NVidia driver like it did for me, it was because I am running 3 display outputs.
I had to set it to one display, then enable all the DSR modes, then activate the other displays.
Now the DSR modes become available and the driver doesnt corrupt.
 
Running sig rig, with the following settings.

Using the 352.86 drivers.

All settings set to their highest available in game option, except the following:

DOF, motion blur, Vignetting, Chromatic aberration all turned off.

2560x1440 using Gsync.

Titan X at 1390/7700 in game clocks(stable clocks i had set for GTA V, haven't tried to push in W3.)

Only change made to the config file is hairworks AA set to 6, down from 8, actually makes a 5-15 fps difference in different situations.

Only played in the White Orchid zone so far, just cleared it and moved into the next zone right before going to bed last night.

Getting 55-80 fps at all times, though with a completely uncapped frame rate, was getting the frametime issues this game has for alot of people(google hitching or lurching witcher 3), with the "hitching" or "lurching" problem while walking. This was not an immediate problem, but appeared a few hours in. This problem is not the horse walk animation loop being not quite smooth, its a separate issue.

Capping the games frame rate in MSI Afterburner's RSS to 60 all but solved the issue, it's a shame to have to cap at 60, but it is the smoothest the game will run currently for me.

15-20 hours in, no crashes what so ever, pretty impressive.

Also impressed by the VRAM usage, with the mentioned settings and resolution above, most VRAM usage i have seen is 2.1gb.
 
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2560x1440. GTX 970 with an average OC.

All Maxxed out except for Foliage set to medium, Hairworks off. Averaging 55fps.
 
660ti 1080p res. Everything high, hairworks off and ssao. Have capped at 30fps and runs smooth for 30fps and very playable. So much for this vram debacle, this 2gig card can still run games!!! :p
 
Yeah but 30fps is really pants compared to 60fps.
I tried it after reading positive comments but its really terrible!
Maybe if you havent seen 60fps on this game its bearable.
 
Nenu said:
Yeah but 30fps is really pants compared to 60fps.
I tried it after reading positive comments but its really terrible!
Maybe if you havent seen 60fps on this game its bearable.
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If you think it's bad in this game you should try a first-person shooter @ 30fps...
 
lol, I'm familiar with what lower fps is like having lived it :)
My point was that there has been some praise for how well 30fps looks in W3 and for those trying to run 60fps and getting jerky performance, its actually better.
I can run 60fps smooth by turning a couple of settings down (GTX980) but thought it must be worth a try at max settings 30fps.
But its bloody awful lol.
 
Nenu said:
Yeah but 30fps is really pants compared to 60fps.
I tried it after reading positive comments but its really terrible!
Maybe if you havent seen 60fps on this game its bearable.
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Yeah captain obvious... Of course 30 fps vs 60 fps isnt as good. I'm trying to make the best with what I have and it's very playable to me. Yes I can get more fps turning stuff down, but like was described earlier, it's very stuttery and jerky making it less smooth so I'll take the 30fps over that!!! ;)
 
Titan X SLI @ 1400/7800. Native res 3440x1440.

60 FPS Settings
3768x1577 DSR & AA "on"...whatever the AA is.
All settings maxed / turned on
4-5GB VRAM

30 FPS Settings
6880x2880, no AA (IIRC), everything maxed
5-6GB VRAM

I think I'll go with the 60FPS settings after playing a few hours with both. I've been sitting a few feet away on purpose. I think you notice the stuttering of 30 FPS much much less that way, probably how consoles get away with it. It's actually more comfortable this way with a controller + it's easier to see the entire screen which helps a bunch in this game.

It's a quite beautiful game and does push my system.
 
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