OFFICIAL The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (Discussion)

[Dalkamyr]

Yes!!! It was worth every penny. It was worth the extra 7 months they decided they needed to polish it. This was a massive endeavor, and CDPR are lucky that they are an independant developer that could afford to do that. Honestly, I bet every studio out there wishes they could do it this way, and I would support them. Imagine the quality of games we would get?!

totally agree with you, the game is friggin awesome aside from the graphics "letdown"... but then again, I believe CDPR can prob fix it in a short amount of time

 

[dyonoctis]

http://www.polygon.com/2015/5/21/86...rade-accusations-maybe-we-shouldnt-have-shown
Anyway, i really do not regret to have give a shot to that "witcher rpg coming from a polish novel ?" out of boredom. The first shot had his share of flaw but, they worked hard to make right and haven't stopped since. They made me feel again the blues of having to quit a wonderfull universe, as the credits roll. The studio have grown so much since then, even with all the gameworks stuff, big guy like Ubi-Soft could learn from them. I'm already looking foward cyberpunk 2077.

 

[ShredBird]

I'm going to side with Steevo on this TW3 looks noticeably worse than TW2, I find it mildly amusing that it looks almost the same on all platforms aside from resolution and framerate.
IMO CDPR optimized their engine so they could use the exact same assets for all platforms and it shows.

They are still running a business, sharing assets between games is good practice from a productivity point of view. Even Rockstar didn't commit to a PC version of GTA V until it could be built up simultaneously with PS4/XB1 which are very similar in architecture. Games are very expensive to produce, anywhere you can save money is good. They don't owe us anything to spend more money, it's their investment to make and their choice on compromising one system on behalf of another. We as consumers can just wait until the game comes out, evaluate and then decide if it's worth our money. Pre-ordering doesn't entitle you to complaint or guarantee that you'll have a say in the game satisfying your wants, it buys you some extra goodies to go along with your game and that's it, and the opportunity cost is the inability to fully evaluate the product before purchase. Many people who pre-order tend to think that the developer "owes" them for fronting them the money when/if the game doesn't meet their expectations. You should of course be entitled to a return should the game be defective or if you were falsely advertised, However, you can't really consider any pre-release footage as false advertising because they're always tagged full of disclaimers saying it's not representative of the final product and is subject to change without notice. Pre-ordering is not an investment, it's an incentive and gamers don't seem to get that. (And I apologize in advance if this sounds like I'm attacking you, I was merely commenting on your observations and the way some people have reacted making the same observations.)

Also, considering the console versions run at 900p and are basically running on gimped Radeon HD 7850s, let's do some math. 1920 x 1080 / 1600 x 900 = 1.44, or 44% increase. Going from 30fps to 60fps is a 100% increase, take an efficiency hit due to API overhead, we'll say it's a 2 digit hit ??%, and then tack on the fact the PC version is likely capable of more computationally expensive effects on ultra settings, add another 2 digit hit ??% then add in Hairworks which has a measureable impact, also a 2 digit hit ??% (I don't know the exact numbers for AMD and Nvidia).

Let's call the gimped 7850 in the PS4 25% slower than a desktop 7850 just for giggles and that our best case mystery double digit scenarios are 15% each. Then to play the Witcher 3 at 1080 at 60fps with ultra settings we need a graphics card that is: .75*1.44*2.00*1.15*1.15*1.15 = 3.3x faster than an HD 7850. This is of course just a model with many things assumed to be scaling linearly with some numbers blatantly guessed, but assumed to be best case scenarios. 3x 7850 I would believe sits somewhere between a GTX970/R9-290 and a Titan X in terms of computational throughput.

Now, this model isn't perfect, but it's more work than most people complaining are doing to justify their claims of the game being unoptimized. The way the game is performing right now seems to agree with the model pretty well. The only anomaly seems to be Kepler, which for some unknown reason seems to be underperforming Maxwell and its GCN competitors. AMD also takes a bigger hit for Hairworks (as does Keppler), which I don't think can be attributed to tessellation performance (can someone check that? How does Kepler/Maxwell/GCN compare on Tessmark?), but rather inaccessible to optimization besides brute forcing lower computational complexity through the driver.

Comments, scrutiny, skepticism welcome. I'll get off my soap box.

 

[dyonoctis]

They are still running a business, sharing assets between games is good practice from a productivity point of view. Even Rockstar didn't commit to a PC version of GTA V until it could be built up simultaneously with PS4/XB1 which are very similar in architecture. Games are very expensive to produce, anywhere you can save money is good. They don't owe us anything to spend more money, it's their investment to make and their choice on compromising one system on behalf of another. We as consumers can just wait until the game comes out, evaluate and then decide if it's worth our money. Pre-ordering doesn't entitle you to complaint or guarantee that you'll have a say in the game satisfying your wants, it buys you some extra goodies to go along with your game and that's it, and the opportunity cost is the inability to fully evaluate the product before purchase. Many people who pre-order tend to think that the developer "owes" them for fronting them the money when/if the game doesn't meet their expectations. You should of course be entitled to a return should the game be defective or if you were falsely advertised, However, you can't really consider any pre-release footage as false advertising because they're always tagged full of disclaimers saying it's not representative of the final product and is subject to change without notice. Pre-ordering is not an investment, it's an incentive and gamers don't seem to get that. (And I apologize in advance if this sounds like I'm attacking you, I was merely commenting on your observations and the way some people have reacted making the same observations.)

Also, considering the console versions run at 900p and are basically running on gimped Radeon HD 7850s, let's do some math. 1920 x 1080 / 1600 x 900 = 1.44, or 44% increase. Going from 30fps to 60fps is a 100% increase, take an efficiency hit due to API overhead, we'll say it's a 2 digit hit ??%, and then tack on the fact the PC version is likely capable of more computationally expensive effects on ultra settings, add another 2 digit hit ??% then add in Hairworks which has a measureable impact, also a 2 digit hit ??% (I don't know the exact numbers for AMD and Nvidia).

Let's call the gimped 7850 in the PS4 25% slower than a desktop 7850 just for giggles and that our best case mystery double digit scenarios are 15% each. Then to play the Witcher 3 at 1080 at 60fps with ultra settings we need a graphics card that is: .75*1.44*2.00*1.15*1.15*1.15 = 3.3x faster than an HD 7850. This is of course just a model with many things assumed to be scaling linearly with some numbers blatantly guessed, but assumed to be best case scenarios. 3x 7850 I would believe sits somewhere between a GTX970/R9-290 and a Titan X in terms of computational throughput.

Now, this model isn't perfect, but it's more work than most people complaining are doing to justify their claims of the game being unoptimized. According to the model here, the way the game is performing right now seems to agree with the model pretty well. The only anomaly seems to be Kepler, which for some unknown reason seems to be underperforming Maxwell and its GCN competitors. AMD also takes a bigger hit for Hairworks (as does Keppler), which I don't think can be attributed to tessellation performance (can someone check that? How does Kepler/Maxwell/GCN compare on Tessmark?), but rather inaccessible to optimization besides brute forcing lower computational complexity through the driver.

Comments, scrutiny, skepticism welcome. I'll get off my soap box.

according to anandtech...http://www.anandtech.com/show/8568/the-geforce-gtx-970-review-feat-evga/13 kepler is nearly as much of a tesselation monster as maxwell.
More numbers :

After a few research, I find out that hairworks isn't as efficient as the last version of tressfx, even on nvidia card. But when amd get in touch with cd projekt, it was too late.

 

[Dalkamyr]

IF SOMEONE here Finds a way to FIX the Toggle Key for Sweetfx 2.0 (reshade) I swear I'm donating and sharing on all my media connections.

Flipping need that fixed AsAp ...

 

[ShredBird]

according to anandtech...http://www.anandtech.com/show/8568/the-geforce-gtx-970-review-feat-evga/13 kepler is nearly as much of a tesselation monster as maxwell.
After a few research, I find out that hairworks isn't as efficient as the last version of tressfx, even on nvidia card. But when amd get in touch with cd projekt, it was too late.

Well, AMD is at a disadvantage for tessellation with the exception of "Tonga" which matches the GTX 770 and GTX 960 which are similarly performing with said R9 285. Weaker tessellation and no optimization, no wonder AMD takes a hit with Hairworks. Kepler though? No real observable reason why it's at a disadvantage to Maxwell or GCN, Hairworks enabled or not

 

[Easo]

I am only missing volumetric clouds (is that correct term?) from the previous screenshots, and water might be a bit better, otherwise, it looks great.

 

[RCoon]

1440p Benchmarks (ran out of time last night, 1080p tomorrow maybe, but I'm at a beer festival and getting super drunk so... maybe Sunday)

Spoiler: Performance Analysis: 1440p

So I did see VRAM hit 2.5GB in a city, but 90% of the time it was under 2GB. CPU load is surprisingly low, though I'm expecting it to hit 50%+ on 1080p due to graphics bottlenecks. That means that an i5 is essentially fine for this game in most cases. Only those on super high end graphics (980 and above) will actually need an i7 for 1080p and higher resolutions.

Either way, This is all on Ultra setting, GameWorks off, SSAO instead of NVidia's HBAO, and motion blur off (Same settings as w1zzard). Literally everything else is maxed out. Not bad FPS figures for those settings.

 

[rtwjunkie]

@RCoon, I will be interested if my unscientific observation is supported by your findings. My cpu usage at 1080 with 780 and i7 shows very even usage accross all 8 threads at about 40% usage, with GPU utilization of 99%. GPU temos are the highest any game has managed ti hit my GPU for, between 60 and 65 degrees Celcius.

 

[the54thvoid]

Well, I'm fighting the griffin now and the game mechanics for combat are seriously doing my head in. I just need to persevere but the loss of control when evading or running away (bravely) which make you stop running to face the bastard is making it much worse. I don't recall Witcher 2 being so obnoxiously awkward to fight with.

 

[RCoon]

Well, I'm fighting the griffin now and the game mechanics for combat are seriously doing my head in. I just need to persevere but the loss of control when evading or running away (bravely) which make you stop running to face the bastard is making it much worse. I don't recall Witcher 2 being so obnoxiously awkward to fight with.

Parrying seems extremely clunky, not particularly fluid. Almost feels like when I press block, I need to do it half a second before I actually want to block, because there's some bizarre delay and the action is slow to make.

 

[the54thvoid]

Parrying seems extremely clunky, not particularly fluid. Almost feels like when I press block, I need to do it half a second before I actually want to block, because there's some bizarre delay and the action is slow to make.

This is bad. It's just awful. The camera angles keep shifting on me, it keeps making me face it and walk when I'm trying to flee to recover a bit. It puts away the crossbow randomly, sheathes my sword...... It's weird, I had no problems against packs of wolves, drowners etc. This 'end of level' boss fight is just wank. A big pile of stinking wank.

 

[rtwjunkie]

On this sheathing, I do find it particularly annoying that if I am charging and fighting from horseback, after I make the run and slice and canter past, Geralt will sheath his sword while i turn around to make another pass. Then it becomes a clumsy fumble with the keyboard to draw again, because the rotwild or whetever it is called or severaal of them have followed me, and now I've got less distance to make my passthru and draw my sword again.

On a side note, I did encounter the map cursor bug. After perusing the GOG forums for patch results (which are mostly positive), I went ahead and installed 1.03. It has upped the graphics quality even more, with no loss of performance. Color me (no pun intended) even more impressed with CDPR than I was.

 

[the54thvoid]

Killed the bugger - wasn't super hard after all, just annoyingly laborious and hard. I'm playing on the 'Broken Bones.' setting.

 

[rtwjunkie]

Killed the bugger - wasn't super hard after all, just annoyingly laborious and hard. I'm playing on the 'Broken Bones.' setting.

I too found the Griffin merely annoying. Far tougher are the packs of Rotfiends you'll face later. No, not a spoiler...Rotfiends have been part of all Witcher games.

I'm currently tracking down the "Bloody Baron's" family. I even got about ten minutes of playing Ciri, which was cool. She has some amazing combat abilities I was not prepared for!

As to the sword combat, I've found if you just go for fast strikes, keep moving and mashing the left mouse, you have a good chance of keeping most enemies off-guard and can prevail, albeit with injuries. A shot or two of Igni usually helps.

At one point at night I faced some bandits. I stayed just out of sight and used my crossbow to whittle 2 of them down to dead. It's very effective to do this, since a group of healthy bandits surrounding Geralt is particularly hard to defeat until at least level 10.

 

[Lopez0101]

I haven't had any real issues with the camera or sword sheathing. Also, the bug on the map where the curosor gets stuck, patch 1.03 was supposed to fix it, but I still get the issue once in awhile. I havne't noticed a pause when blocking. I enabled the "Hardware cursor" setting in the options and noticed much better responsiveness and less input lag.

 

[rtwjunkie]

I haven't had any real issues with the camera or sword sheathing. Also, the bug on the map where the curosor gets stuck, patch 1.03 was supposed to fix it, but I still get the issue once in awhile. I havne't noticed a pause when blocking. I enabled the "Hardware cursor" setting in the options and noticed much better responsiveness and less input lag.

So THAT's what the Hardware Cursor setting is for!! I'm guessing it gives control back to the mouse's drivers? Anyway, I will have to give it a try.

You're lucky about the sword sheathing. Geralt does it on horseback at the most inopportune moments for me.

 

[Lopez0101]

I've only fought bandits on horseback a couple of times, didn't have the issue. I usually hop off before getting into fights.

 

[rtwjunkie]

I've only fought bandits on horseback a couple of times, didn't have the issue. I usually hop off before getting into fights.

Try Horseback fighting against rotfiends and drowners. Keep in mind it needs a run to be really effective, and it's very damaging to enemies. This means you pass thru the combat and make a turn-around, with enough room to build up speed again. It's at this point where he sheathes it, and it's a mad fumble to draw in time and start running. It's a 3 finger scramble on the keyboard!

EDIT: Still looking for horse blinders. Anyone know if it's possible to go back to the White Orchard map so I can buy some?

 

[Vayra86]

http://kotaku.com/5961994/what-skyrim-looks-like-when-youre-running-100-mods-at-once

http://www.asot.es/2001/09/skyrim-mods.html

https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3779/13791348213_4f1e205a19_o.jpg

https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7063/13791677814_4cd6680a4f_o.jpg

https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3674/13364769244_f20b58b942_o.jpg

The mod community has set the benchmark very high, and I believe dev would do well to hire out some of the modders to work on graphics while the developer makes terrain, game story, and opens the engine up for more tweaking under the hood by people. But that is going against everything that Nvidia GameWorks is about..... and they are asserting themselves on the gamers behalf with the profits they make on the hardware gamers buy to make sure a game runs like shit on competitive hardware, and kinda crappy on one generation old hardware of theirs.

"Hire some modders..." devs already do this! But modders are not engineers. And engineers are not modders. A modder works with existing material, creating it from scratch, ESPECIALLY when it comes to handling the graphics API, is a whole other ball game.

Things are not that simple. Also I really have issues with all the misguided whine about graphics / downgraded crap and the idea that Kepler is being treated badly. The vast majority of this is just internet trolling gone wild, and what remains is largely uninformed whining. Of course a heavily tesselated game will run better on Maxwell than it will on Kepler, and OF COURSE Kepler will show lesser gains from a game ready patch. We have already seen 23% more performance across the board from Kepler driver updates in the past. Maxwell is a new arch, ofcourse it is going to have greater gains with new drivers.

And it is funny you should mention Skyrim or compare TW3 with TW2. Compare TW3 with Skyrim and we have a region map in TW3 that offers far more detail at distances than even a fully modded Skyrim does, and does so with an incredibly low memory (VRAM) footprint, staying nicely within 2GB even on ultra. Compare TW3 to TW2 and we have more impressive lighting effects but slightly less sharp texturing but we gain massive region maps that can be used all the way, instead of a linear environment. Last but not least, there is a much more widespread use of physics all the way round, literally every object is affected by weather conditions - again, Skyrim or TW2 won't even come close.

People need to get real. The Witcher 3 is an astounding feat of optimisation.

 

[Devil-Walker]

Try Horseback fighting against rotfiends and drowners. Keep in mind it needs a run to be really effective, and it's very damaging to enemies. This means you pass thru the combat and make a turn-around, with enough room to build up speed again. It's at this point where he sheathes it, and it's a mad fumble to draw in time and start running. It's a 3 finger scramble on the keyboard!

EDIT: Still looking for horse blinders. Anyone know if it's possible to go back to the White Orchard map so I can buy some?

yes go to a sign post fast travel open world map and u should be able to go back

 

[Lopez0101]

I've found some once on the map, but the horse racing is the easiest way and you also get a better saddle.

 

[rtwjunkie]

I'm going to try going back, and if that is fruitless, horse-racing it is!

 

[Batou1986]

IF SOMEONE here Finds a way to FIX the Toggle Key for Sweetfx 2.0 (reshade) I swear I'm donating and sharing on all my media connections.

Flipping need that fixed AsAp ...

Have you tried remapping the toggle key in Global_settings.txt found in the sweetfx folder ?

 

[rtwjunkie]

I noticed that this game really demands alot from a system. It's the first game I can recall since I started noticing a year ago (yeah, I know, very scientific ) that consistently has me drawing over 400w of power.