Witcher 3 Benchmarks! Holy Balls this game is demanding!

[Anarchyz11]

Every game has its unoptimized graphical setting that tanks framerates.  For AC:Unity it was any AA beyond FXAA, for this game it's Hairworks and Foliage Visibility Range.

 

 

Turning Hairworks off and Foliage Visibility Range from Ultra to High literally gave me 25fps back at 1440p with virtually zero noticeable loss in graphical fidelity.  Everything else is maxed and stable at 60fps on a 980 at 1440p.  I see no reason why an R9 290 or 970 can't max the game out, minus these two settings, at 1080p. 

 

This is why benchmarks should be taken with a grain of salt.  There's always a setting or two in them that is unoptimized to a level that it's unrealistic for anyone to run them.

[shert73]

Wonder how it will run on my sli 980s. But I'm not even buying it till TB puts out a port report.

[Samfisher]

GTA V runs at 40FPS on my 970 with high-ultra settings, and for a last-gen port, it's just bad optimization.

 

Forgot Shadow of Mordor, I can run that max and it looks incredible - even with the 'ultra' textures that are supposed to use 6GB VRAM

 

Mine runs at 60.  + that game is beautiful

[Misanthrope]

This game likes to run everything at high but really takes a dive after most things are set to ultra. I'll play around with each individual setting to see what hits performance the most.

[Humbug]

Turning Hairworks off and Foliage Visibility Range from Ultra to High literally gave me 25fps back at 1440p with virtually zero noticeable loss in graphical fidelity.  Everything else is maxed and stable at 60fps on a 980 at 1440p.  I see no reason why an R9 290 or 970 can't max the game out, minus these two settings, at 1080p. 

 

This is why benchmarks should be taken with a grain of salt.  There's always a setting or two in them that is unoptimized to a level that it's unrealistic for anyone to run them.

Good post. It's important not to be OCD about maxing settings. Some of those option devs leave in because they know that this is PC and we can turn it off.

 

Single R9 290, running at 1440p, mix of high and ultra settings, vsync on, frame rate unlimited, hardware mouse, hairworks off (obviously), regular SSAO. Frame rate holding at 50-60 most of the time.

not bad. Wonder how much it will improve with next week's driver.

 

[Briggsy]

not bad. Wonder how much it will improve with next week's driver.

This is probably one of the most optimized games at launch I've seen for a long time. The frame times are butter smooth. Will be interesting indeed to see what performance can be squeezed further, plus if they can do a crossfire profile.

[Da'Argo]

I knew I should have gotten that second 970. Oh well.

[ashtaroth]

Dang, you guys are having problems with optimization. I'm having problems buying the game from stores. Always asking for I.D. not believing I'm 24 only in Australia I guess?

[Xorbot]

Unfortunately not for my 1440p monitor.  However, seems *mostly* good at 1080p for 60 FPS using 680s.  At 2 GB, this SLI combo is definitely the "last-gen of resolutions", i.e. 1080p anyway.  I pushed 1440p as far as GTA 5 with those cards for 60 FPS, but TW3 has finally marked the end of the era.

 

@Casperian

@Brainless906

 

I would like to post an update.  From another user in one of the many TW3 threads, I got the hint to turn off the NVIDIA Hair Works.  I forgot that I had it enabled while I was tweaking settings on first launch.  That person stated that their GTX 980 FPS tanked about 25 worth after enabling Hair Works.  So I decided to turn it off.  It turns out that not only did 1920x1080 run easily at 60 FPS, I decided to re-try 2560x1440.  Sure enough, I can run it at 60 FPS (the vast majority of the time, still dips at places).

 

The 2x GTX 680 SLI lives on for at least another year!  Really though, it is the 2 GB vram holding these cards back.  2x Keplers is still a lot of horsepower in 2015.

[sgloux3470]

Game looks great, running at 4K is an issue though.  I get around 35-40 FPS... but it's causing my monitor to flicker. (Which is weird since it normally doesn't do that until 10-20 FPS)  So I dropped it to 2560x1440 and it runs at 50-60 FPS and looks great.  I'm going to wrap up my playthrough of TW2 before I jump in proper though.

 

Also TW2's draw distance is pretty abysmal compared to TW3...

 

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/715289650367544946/9A796C655A2A4F2976DD90EA3AFB5421AFE40563/

[Zah]

Downgrade isn't as bad as I thought it would be.  It's noticeable in Velen, but damn if this game doesn't look great.

[Humbug]

This is probably one of the most optimized games at launch I've seen for a long time. The frame times are butter smooth. Will be interesting indeed to see what performance can be squeezed further, plus if they can do a crossfire profile.

So much for all the worse than Assassin's Creed Unity talk yesterday...

[Briggsy]

So much for all the worse than Assassin's Creed Unity talk yesterday...

 

I dunno who was saying that. CDProjeckt would have to try pretty hard to slide under that bar.

[Jasmin]

One 780Ti running at 1137mhz can manage the maxed out setting at 1080p with 40-65fps. Biggest tankers from 3 hours of testing:

1) Default window settings - for whatever reason game defaults to borderless, changing it to full window gives good 10 fps.

2) Foliage draw distance, from ultra to high gives another 5 fps, difference is neglible.

3) Max characters in the background - lowest setting equals to 75, have not seen one place where it comes even close. Dropping to low gives another fps or two for free.

4) Hairworks.... Id say go all in or all out. Disabling it gives A LOT of extra fps. BUT, do not test the difference at tbe start of the game, instead in the first mini village past 3 hanging corpses. After a moment there is a wolf attack there. Im a sucker for smooth gameplay, but after seeing the wolf with hairworks, i cannot bring myself to turn it off.

5) Ultra details and ultra textures - dropping both to high gives about 10 fps, but the difference in how the game looks is enormous. Two different generations id claim.

6) Postprocessing - hbao+ is actually not a big difference fps wise vs ssao. Chromatic abberation and motion blur off give extra 2-3 fps for making the game look better imo.

It's a first game where i decided to go below 60 just because of how it looks. Dont test in the intro, test in the first village, fps chsnges are greatest there, and the graphics changes the most between settings.

I have no idea about the downgrade, but walking around near sunset makes it the most beautiful game ive seen so far. Nothing comes even close. The tessalation used is on the highest level ive seen anywhere but tech demos - most impressed so far by helmets on few of the soldiers i passed - the dents are so freaking realistic that it migbt as well have been my own helmet scanned in.

[Doobeedoo]

Game seems to be running pretty good for now with my R9 290 and FX 8350

[TorqueS]

Um...yeah...either my PC is stupid again, or W3 is very well optimized.

I got the GOG version, spanked ultra settings, disabled hairworks and moved that foliage draw distance to low and i'm getting consistent 35-45FPS@1600x900 res, but i notice some weird stuff going on:

-VRAM usage is low. It uses 1.2GB from 1.9GB(~2GB available)

-even if it's under 60FPS, the game runs smooth, very smooth with no game breaking dips and drops.

 

 

Hardware is:

- FX8350@4Ghz(undervolted). I haven't been playing, nor rendered too much recently so there is no point in running at 4.7-4.8Ghz for chrome and YT.

-Sapphire R9 270@1Ghz

Temps after about 30mins of gameplay(ambient 24 degrees, fans on H80i@850RPM)

It's weird...really weird..i was expecting to run it at medium.

[Enferk]

Wow that's demanding game. Feel sad for my friend whose computer is pretty crappy and he has hyped Wicher 3 from the announcement..

[Robin88]

Running the game on the rig in my sig it's actually really good with performance, I'm getting about 45FPS on medium, and that's with a GPU that is well below the minimum spec for the game.
And wow, the game is absolutely stunning, I cranked it up to it's highest settings and got about 9FPS though, that HairWorks stuff absolutely kills the framerate, and if I put everything else on max and turn off HairWorks I still get 25FPS average in a populated area which considering the GPU I have, that's pretty damn good.

And those of you whining about it being unoptimised, please stfu, it runs great considering I have a weak GPU, and even at medium it looks amazing. Having said that though HairWorks is a crock of shit, way too demanding for what doesn't really add all that much to the game visually, at least, not at the point of the game I'm at, so even when I get a new rig I don't think I'll be turning it on unless CDPR can optimise it further.

[DEDRICK]

R9 290 checking in.  1440p Ultra except for Hairworks Off and Foliage @ High, roughly 45 FPS average

[Notional]

Running the game on the rig in my sig it's actually really good with performance, I'm getting about 45FPS on medium, and that's with a GPU that is well below the minimum spec for the game.

And wow, the game is absolutely stunning, I cranked it up to it's highest settings and got about 9FPS though, that HairWorks stuff absolutely kills the framerate, and if I put everything else on max and turn off HairWorks I still get 25FPS average in a populated area which considering the GPU I have, that's pretty damn good.

And those of you whining about it being unoptimised, please stfu, it runs great considering I have a weak GPU, and even at medium it looks amazing. Having said that though HairWorks is a crock of shit, way too demanding for what doesn't really add all that much to the game visually, at least, not at the point of the game I'm at, so even when I get a new rig I don't think I'll be turning it on unless CDPR can optimise it further.

 

Yeah the game itself is very optimized. It's HairWorks that isn't and can't be optimized on AMD, that's the problem. But yeah, the game looks great.

[LAwLz]

Yeah the game itself is very optimized. It's HairWorks that isn't and can't be optimized on AMD, that's the problem. But yeah, the game looks great.

It seems like HairWorks is just demanding no matter which brand you got. Even Nvidia users are reporting 10-30 FPS increases when toggling it off.

This just confirms what I said before in the Watch_Dogs threads. GameWorks isn't good or bad by itself. Developers are free to implement it however they want and if they do they should have an on/off switch for it. Not like in Watch_Dogs where they were on at all time.

 

TL;DR - Give users the option to turn stuff on/off like CDPR did!

[Unhelpful]

I dont always blindly trust benchmarks, there can be errors in testing, or drivers etc so far i have found my 780ti plays almost everything maxxed out at 1440p despite what some benchmarks say

Day one drivers lol.

[Notional]

It seems like HairWorks is just demanding no matter which brand you got. Even Nvidia users are reporting 10-30 FPS increases when toggling it off.

This just confirms what I said before in the Watch_Dogs threads. GameWorks isn't good or bad by itself. Developers are free to implement it however they want and if they do they should have an on/off switch for it. Not like in Watch_Dogs where they were on at all time.

 

TL;DR - Give users the option to turn stuff on/off like CDPR did!

 

http://www.pcgameshardware.de/The-Witcher-3-PC-237266/Specials/Grafikkarten-Benchmarks-1159196/

 

Makes sure to press the HairWorks tab on the first benchmark. Auf = OFF, An = ON. Average 970, is 35% better than 290x. Without, it's only 4% (with HBAO+). Without that either, it's pretty neck and neck. So yeah HairWorks is horribly optimized, and run like shit on everything, but there is a massive added performance hit on AMD cards.

[GrimNeo]

 

Here is the page with the benchmark

 

http://www.pcgameshardware.de/The-Witcher-3-PC-237266/Specials/Grafikkarten-Benchmarks-1159196/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nvidia Geforce GTX Titan X / 12GHairworks from

 

 

 

That link destroyed my work pc. IE 8 ftw.

[anthonyc813]

You can download many UE4 demos and they run great because the engine is highly optimized.

And AC Unity also look and runs better than the Witcher 3 and that was one of the most un-optimized games I've ever played.

Same goes for Watchdogs and GTA V.

 

 

This guy has to work for UbiSoft