The official Witcher 3 thread

[StaggerLee]

Yup.

Look here for the comparison.

Info in German. To sum it up, things look a bit better now, especially shadows and features like AO and water tessellation are working too. There's a bit of a performance hit though, although that could be fixed with new drivers from AMD/Nvidia. More settings have also appeared in the options menu relating to draw distance, NPC count and frame limits.

Ja, it's disappointing that CDPR went the bullshot route, for sure. I would've hoped that they had more integrity than that, but the PS4 reviews at 92% on metacritic aren't there just because the game looks good, they are there because it's an excellent game. So I guess playing the game tomorrow will be the ultimate test.

[Isengard]

I'm definitely turning Hairworks on!

[The_Imp_ZA]

[MENTION=9032]StaggerLee[/MENTION] , [MENTION=96]Isengard[/MENTION]

Some early benchmarks for you. Once again in German. That's Ultra, with everything turned on, according to google translate. I'm surprised the GTX960 beats the 770, that keeps on happening lately. So much for the 960 being rubbish.

[StaggerLee]

[MENTION=9032]StaggerLee[/MENTION] , [MENTION=96]Isengard[/MENTION]

Some early benchmarks for you. Once again in German. That's Ultra, with everything turned on, according to google translate. I'm surprised the GTX960 beats the 770, that keeps on happening lately. So much for the 960 being rubbish.

There does seem to be a slight improvement between the preview code and day 1 patch, most notably with the water appearance. I'm really keen to see what it looks like on my PC.

[The_Imp_ZA]

There does seem to be a slight improvement between the preview code and day 1 patch, most notably with the water appearance. I'm really keen to see what it looks like on my PC.

The water looks way better. Those guys also say that it reacts to you now, so if you cast Aard at the water, it'll move.

I hope they've managed to fix the blood decals not reacting to the water. In earlier footage from last year, when Geralt attacked enemies in the swamp, their blood would actually collect and disintegrate in the water. I remember them casting Aard and the bloodied water flew away.

Details like that can really immerse you in a game.

[Graal]

I'll be honest, my care levels for the graphics are very low. It's not like I expected to be able to play it at high graphics anyway, so this affects me very little.

[StaggerLee]

I'll be honest, my care levels for the graphics are very low. It's not like I expected to be able to play it at high graphics anyway, so this affects me very little.

To be fair, I don't think anyone here is really fazed about the downgrade. For me personally it's a bit disappointing that a studio whom I hold in very high regard resorted to cheap bull-shots to build hype. Yes, I know it's standard industry practice, but CDPR were supposed to be the champions of the PC platform! I'm sure I'm going to love the game all the same though.

[The_Imp_ZA]

To be fair, I don't think anyone here is really fazed about the downgrade. For me personally it's a bit disappointing that a studio whom I hold in very high regard resorted to cheap bull-shots to build hype. Yes, I know it's standard industry practice, but CDPR were supposed to be the champions of the PC platform! I'm sure I'm going to love the game all the same though.

I think saying they used bullshots is a bit of an understatement. The game underwent a massive downgrade. I'm still going to enjoy playing it immensely, but no one can deny that CDPR straight up lied when they said that the versions showed previously are what people can expect. Unlike Watch_Dogs though, the game still looks good. It's the only reason the press haven't jumped on the downgrade bandwagon yet.

Some performance comparisons in English, over at PC Gamer.

I've put together a quick gallery at the top of the page highlighting differences between the low, medium and ultra presets built into the graphics options. You'll need to view them full-size to see the difference, especially if you're looking for the gap between medium and ultra settings.

The Witcher 3 looks surprisingly good on medium settings, which is good news if you don't have a mega-rig. The low setting preset looks okay in these still shots, but there's a lot of foliage and character pop-in that's very distracting when the game's in motion. Textures on NPCs, particularly clothing, suffer on low settings, and you'll notice some blurriness at medium. At ultra the foliage is plumper and there's a lot more of it. A lot of the high-end effects, like HBAO+ postprocessing and ultra shadows, are very subtle improvements for a noticeable framerate hit. The game still looks great even if you can't put everything up to ultra.

We'll get into some more detailed framerate tests as our review progresses, but here's how it performs up on my office machine—GTX 970 GPU, i5-2500K CPU (4x3.3GHz), 16GB RAM. Ultra: 40 - 50 FPS, dropping to near 30 in some conversations. Disabling HairWorks immediately adds 5-10 FPS, dropping shadows down to from ultra to high in addition gives smooth close-to-60 performance. Medium: 70-100 FPS Low: 100-120 FPS

For nVidia card owners, their tweaking guide is up now, as well.

[pr0digy]

Takealot is getting me nervous, especially considering I took off tomorrow and Wednesday. It would suck if that was all for nothing.

Ended up phoning Takealot, they said item is in stock. And on their system it shows as shipped so should arrive tomorrow morning, Phew now I can be in hype mode instead of worry mode.

[Isengard]

Got an SMS saying order is scheduled for tomorrow. So YAY!