The cost of running The Witcher 3 at Ultra is high

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has wowed critics, and for good reason

There’s a lot to be excited about in The Witcher 3, its gorgeous visuals in particular, but can you play it the way it was designed to be experienced, at Ultra settings at 1080p?

Thanks to some unrestricted access to the PC version of the game, Gamestar has reported that an i7-4790K, GTX 980 and 16GB of RAM was what it took to run the game at 60fps on Ultra settings.

Do you have the necessary specs to run The Witcher 3 as it was meant to be played?

No, that was not a nod to NVIDIA. It may as well be though because it’s the best way to achieve it.

CPU: Intel i7-4790K

Intel is your only real option at the moment.

R4,599 at RebelTech & Wootware
R4,615 at Landmark Computers
R4,858 at Takealot
R5,005 at ComX-Computers

GPU: Geforce GTX 980

Nvidia’s offerings are likely to have the advantage, but we won’t discount AMD.

R7,899 at RebelTech & Wootware – GALAX GeForce GTX 980 SOC
R8,966 at Landmark Computers – MSI Geforce GTX 980
R9,012 at Takealot – MSI Geforce GTX 980
R9,560 at ComX-Computer – Asus STRIX GTX980

Possible Alternative: AMD Radeon R9 290X

Without a benchmark on AMD’s cards at Ultra settings for The Witcher 3, we can only speculate on what card might do the job. A R9 290X may be up to the task, but we doubt it given the performance gap between the R9 290X and GTX 980.

Should it, however, you can score yourself a Sapphire Radeon R9 290X on RebelTech for R5,933.

RAM: DDR3 16GB Kit

DDR3 16GB

R1,599 at Wootware – G.Skill Ares
R1,829at RebelTech – Kingston Hyper-X Fury
R1,932 at Landmark Computers – Kingston Hyper-X Fury
R2,420 at Takealot – Corsair Vengeance

All-in-all, the cheapest possible combination of GPU, CPU and RAM comes to R14,097. That’s a lot of money to run a game at 60fps at 1080p. The Witcher 3’s Ultra settings must be mega.

We’ll leave the decision of motherboard to you. Just throw in those components, along with your preferred motherboard, into your chassis (here’s hoping you have a capable PSU) and you should be good to go.

Just by the way, Evetech is offering the i7-4790K, MSI Z87-G43 and a Crucial Ballistix TT 16GB kit, a good portion of the hardware you’d need for The Witcher 3 on Ultra, in a singular bundle for R14,067 or R13,398 if you pay cash.

So how many of you have the rigs to handle CD Projekt RED’s conclusion to the fantastic trilogy?

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