The Witcher 3 is the New Crysis

Past now it's clear why The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt doesn't look nearly every bit good as the 2022'south trailer: fifty-fifty in its electric current uber beautiful class, the game is simply too demanding for today's hardware.

To play on ultra settings at 1080p you'll need a R9 290 just to boilerplate 36fps and your minimum will be every bit depression as 18fps. Meanwhile, the GTX 770 was expert for an boilerplate of simply 30fps and would dip to 16fps on occasion. The game looks impressive with maxed out settings, though we are not sure information technology's impressive enough to warrant such low frame rates when playing at 1080p on high-end GPUs.

Nvidia'south HairWorks plays an important role in making The Witcher iii stand out visually, but it'due south that same feature that spoils performance to a halt. When enabled, hair quality is impressive, but expect a 20% drop in average frame rates and a shocking 60% reduction in minimum fps.

The game's minimum frame rate was 156% higher on the GTX 780 with HairWorks disabled. In comparison, the GTX 780's minimum frame rate was just 64% greater with TressFX disabled in Tomb Raider.

Nosotros'd love to meet The Witcher 3 using AMD'due south TressFX and chances are Nvidia'southward own hardware would run faster, especially Kepler-based cards. Moreover, had CD Projekt Red left HairWorks out of the game, there's a good chance we would have ended up with a game that looks more like the one we saw in 2022's trailer, minus the lifelike hair of course.

For those wondering, playing on ultra quality on PC, The Witcher 3 looks better than on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, but not worlds meliorate. The PS4 runs at 1080p only is locked at 30fps and even so players are reporting noticeable slowdowns. Based on what we've seen, we gauge that the visual quality on the PS4 is comparable to the PC with medium graphics and high quality postal service-processing.

It seems many folks believe 30fps is fine for a function-playing game and for the most function that is true, merely The Witcher iii has very low minimum frame rates, especially when playing on ultra quality. The GTX 970, for example, would dip down to merely 21fps despite an average of 43fps.

Fortunately, CPU performance doesn't seem to be an result and AMD FX owners don't have annihilation to worry about here.

Although nosotros haven't fully tested SLI performance notwithstanding, we can ostend that scaling is exceptionally expert. In fact, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt could be used every bit the perfect SLI marketing tool. Without it, gamers packing something every bit powerful as the GTX 980 won't sustain 60fps at 1080p, while two cards yield well over 100fps. Multi-GPU technology is required for 4K gaming, where not even the GTX Titan 10 will suffice.

Update on Patch ane.03

Hours before going live with our performance review, CDPR released patch 1.03 with many improvements related to graphics settings and performance. Here's some of them:

  • Improves stability in gameplay and the UI.
  • Improves performance especially in cutscenes and gameplay
  • Fixes grass and foiliage popping that can occur after density parameters alter
  • Improves Nvidia Hairworks operation
  • Boosted texture anisotropy sampling to 16x on ultra preset
  • Sharpen Postprocess settings extended from Off/On to Off/Normal/High

Subsequently some preliminary testing, we've observed mild performance improvements in the order of 5% to 15% which volition help to run the game at smoother frame rates. The change is not dramatic, but for such a demanding title, every scrap counts. We plan to go on testing to make certain nosotros are not missing anything, though based on the graphs below we are confident our tests remain valid for all GPUs and their relative positions confronting competitors.