The Witcher 3 Best Performance

I also have flickering sometimes, but it is very rare and only lasts a couple of seconds. Is that what you meant with shadow flickering?

 

i really don't know if i'm having shadow pop-ins. I didn't look for it and i didn't notice any. I'm running the game at 1440p. Framerate locked to 60fps and vsync is on. Hairworks is off. Nearly everthing else set to ultra, except water (medium) and foliage distance (high, to maintain a steady 60fps and play stutter free).

In the postprocessing menu i have AA disabled (or else the profile won't work). Motion Blur and chromatic aberration are off. Sharpening is set to low (high is a bit to much for me) and i'm using HDAO+

Only thing that i changed with the costum profile in CCC is the CrossFire profile (sdhdships.exe).

 

Ran W3 in crossfire with a 295x2, flicker was there and it was not ripping through the game the way I thought it would.

Foliage was on high and hair works off, sat at 60fps to start with, MSI showed both GPUs in use, and so I just thought a patch would land in a day or so.

A day or so passes and guy says turn crossfire off, no point, so I left game settings the same, and true enough the one GPU gave me same fps.

In my case there was no reason to run the broken crossfire with flicker, but that also means that in crossfire the card will (should) have no issues.

Cannot understand how AMD messed this up so badly, and they keep bringing up Hairworks, but whats that got to do with crossfire? a thing that should be at the core of a launch is hardware able to run the game, tweaks down the line yes, but at least the GPUs in use as they should be.....we can turn hairworks off.

It would seem AMD make ok/good stuff, but if you want new release games up and running they are not the ones to back, if you buy games weeks/months after launch, then pick them, if you want faster support (not saying Nvidia are perfect, just faster) then Nvidia.

If crossfire is not up and running in a day, maybe two, well next time I upgrade, there is no way it will be AMD, and its a shame because Nvidia need competition......but competition thats getting it right.

 

Yea, but i get it quite often.
And, I didnt test much yet but i tried Default Mode, turn off in game vsync + set ingame fps limit to 60.Then i use RivalTurner statistic server to limit framerate to 50 fps. It's seem like it removed stutter with default mode.

 

Durante did a graphics review and found that the in-game limiter isnt as good as using RTSS.

 

I can't stand tearing...

 

Okay, sweetfx AA is awesome. It looks great and has very low performance impact compared to ingame AA. Also, ingame AA has no effect on tree branches somehow. I double checked, and only Geralt and houses get AA'd with ingame AA.

It's easy to install too:
- download latest sweetfx beta here: https://sfx.thelazy.net/downloads/
- extract somewhere
- setup, point to exe, done. No further config needed, sweetfx has AA standard on and no other adjustments enabled.

 

I can see ingame AA on the branches, it's subtle at best and looks like sweetfx with some very low settings.

The performance hit is sick though, but then again i don't know how much it improves the more heavily stuff.

I thought the AA was simply some "SMAA with Temporal" or something, so i was kinda looking forward to it, but everyone seems to dislike the AA so guess it's not what we hoped for;P

 

The performance hit isn't sick with a single card. The FPS only dips so much, because it isn't working very well with CrossFire enabled.

 

It's true - no ingame AA on branches.
But even so, ingame AA all the way for me.

I've tried SMAA/FXAA and they don't do anything against temporal aliasing, which for me is the worst type of aliasing.

 

Thanks Rex, I'll try that out when I get home.

 

Ah so the Temporal thing works, interesting.
Cause i agree there, while AA looks terrible in static scenes, you don't really think about it in motion.

The Temporal-Aliasing (which of course comes from normal AA) is the painful one, it looks like everything is made of glittering crystals. Sometimes it may be kinda nice, for example on sharp stuff or stuff that should glitter.
But overall it just removes the focus from the game and you all you see is glittering all over the place;P (Textures does this as well, like ground textures, damn that's frustrating).

 

I have the 15.4 beta and don't have this sdhdship.exe profile.

It's only on 15.5 beta? It is better than 14.12 or 15.3 (that is better than 15.4)

 

Yeah, it is only in the 15.5 beta as far as i know.

 

I played a good few hours with water on medium now and sdhdship.exe, it works fairly decently, well enough for me to keep using it going forward. Scaling never dropped, even in rain.

I still get the occasional shadow flicker and FPS drop (down to ~50FPS) but overall it's smoother than with a single card. Too bad it won't work with in-game AA, the temporal component it seems to have was doing a pretty good job for me. I'm injecting SMAA with SweetFX now but there's some noticeable "sparkling" on some textures. Pretty much no visible aliasing though, that's great. I think the sparkling may have something to do with 1.04 and the improved texture filtering they introduced, some things do look nicer to me.

I also had to lock FPS to 60 using RTSS, even with in-game VSync I was somehow seeing quite a bit of variation in frame time, not even sure how this is happening. This doesn't completely fix it but it does make it better.

I wish AMD got off their asses and released a driver with a CF profile, or they could at least tell us what the hell they're doing.

It's in 15.4 as well but it's "hidden" so you can't select it in CCC. You can rename witcher3.exe to sdhdship.exe, that worked for me, though I have the leaked 15.5 installed now and can't test on the latest patch.

 

Is RTSS better at frame locking than the in-game frame-lock?

 

Any fix for stuttering? It is game breaker.. 1.04, 15.4, ultra settings, vsync, 30fps lock

 

Yes, according to this article http://www.pcgamer.com/durantes-witcher-3-analysis-the-alchemy-of-smoothness/
The whole article is a good read.

Spoiler

 

For those that have the stutter, not really, I've tried everything.

 

yeah, thats the article i was referring to on the last page.