Because games these days have literally tens of thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of shader variants. How much time are players willing to tolerate to compile as many shaders as possible during boot up? A few minutes? An hour? While their CPU churns away at 100% and is practically unusable..... Also, some shaders apparently need to be compiled during runtime due to games becoming more and more dynamic in nature so it's not easy to predict which shaders are going to be needed at any one time. How developers improve the situation is by making sure that shader compilation during boot up/loading becomes mandatory, and even more importantly, by making sure that the CPU is utilized effectively by the game. The last one is something a lot of developers are having issues with more than anything. Yes, as CPUs become more powerful, shader compilation stutters will also become less and less noticeable. Raptor Lake was a big step in that direction from my experience. Before I upgraded to my current rig, I had an old 6900K Broadwell-E system and to me, shader compilation was FAR more noticeable. I beat the Witcher 3 on that old system and I remember after changing drivers, the system would need to recompile all the shaders and so compilation stutters would be very noticeable until the compiled shaders were cached. But on my current system with the latest patch which improves CPU utilization, I don't get any shader compilation stutters even after driver updates because the 13900K is just so much faster. And it's not just the CPU, but the rest of the system including my SK Hynix Platinum P41 2TB SSD and my 32GB of DDR5 7600 CL34. PC's typically need to be significantly more powerful than the consoles to achieve a similar performance due to the additional overhead. This is even more true in the current generation of consoles because both the PS5 and XSX have stuff like dedicated hardware decompression so their CPU overhead is automatically much lower than a gaming PC's. To equal that, a PC needs very powerful CPUs and high speed memory and SSDs. We're getting there though. By the time Zen 5 and Arrow Lake come out, those PCs will make the PS5 and XSX look like PS3s and Xbox 360s
Really interesting reading that; I just finished my new build with a 7700X and RTX 3080 and was worried that it won't run the new Witcher DX12/RT update after hearing how badly it's performing on people's top end rig. To my surprise the game runs fantastic at 1440P maxed out with RT and DLSS quality with frames mostly staying above 50 with a few occasions dipping into the 40's. What I did notice (and in CP2077 too) was how smooth the game felt even when frames were dipping into the mid 40's so what you just said made a lot of sense. In regards to crashes after the update everything would crash for me except for one single (my latest) save file that worked but fully uninstalling and reinstalling the game fixed that up for me.
I’m running RT off because it runs like crap. It doesn’t matter if it looks better because it’s unplayable with it on.
That's because after the update, the game is now using the CPU more effectively and so frame pacing is now leaps and bounds better than before as the GPU isn't having to wait around for data from the CPU to draw a frame. If you had played the game before this latest update, your experience would not have been so positive. People typically underestimate the impact of the CPU on gaming experience and performance. I think we were spoiled during the PS3/Xbox 360 and PS4/Xbox One eras where the average PC had a CPU that was in many ways, multiple times faster than what was in the consoles. But with the PS5 and XSX, the consoles finally have a worthy CPU plus hardware decompression and so as a result, the CPU is becoming more and more important for performance. When Arrow Lake and Zen 5 are released, those CPUs will be roughly twice as fast as the ones in the consoles and we'll see the pendulum swing back in favor of the PC.
So once again, the crashes with FG on are a driver related problem. nVidia acknowledged that in their open issues. That means the game might crash from one moment to another: Amazing!
Have no issues with this new update, game runs like before for me tbh, maybe in Novigradd a tad smoother, but it was smooth before as well for me. No crashes at all, but I am still running on old 528.24 drivers, as I rarely update my drivers, from my experience they do not bring major improvements.
Funny, it's not mentioned in the 531.29 thread (https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/nvidia-geforce-531-29-whql-driver-download-discussion.447022/)
Must have been added at a later time. I forgot adding the source, just in case: GeForce GRD 531.29 Feedback Thread ( | NVIDIA GeForce Forums That's a good deterrent to stop using them haha!
That explains a lot. Which drivers are the last ones that are stable? I had the problem with 531.26 hotfix as well, so I'm guessing anything before 531.xx. Update: I've tried the 528.49 drivers (used DDU in safe mode to clean the 531.29s from the system) and I'm still getting the crashes with frame generation on, sadly.
That's weird, I'm on 528.49 and played over 40hrs of Witcher 3 using FG without any app crashes (pre-patch of course).
Pre-4.02 patch it ran fine and stable for me as well. But with 4.02 I get crashes when FG is on. The most reliable way to reproduce a crash fastest for me is on Hierarch square, standing behind the yeller on the box with the camera on the book pyre.
With all the games using DLSS these days and how bad DLSS sharpening is I find the GFE sharpen filter to be a necessary thing.
To me Reshade is far superior and versatile, and it doesn't have such a big impact on framerate as the freestyle filters do.
Reshade is just more of a hassle to me. It’s so quick and easy with the freestyle filters. I also haven’t noticed any significant impact on performance with them ever.
Yeah, it occurs on older drivers as well, a friend just let me know. That's too bad. I got two games I wanted to play, Hogwarts Legacy and this one. The first has its lighting system completely messed up after the latest patch, the latter crashes randomly. 2023 looks prosmising hehehe. I am having more fun playing Quake 2 rtx right now than anything else. It doesn't crash and it's a lot of fun.
Personally I had a 10-15% lower framerate on the 3080 after activating one of the filters. On Reshade it's 2-3 fps. Come on it's not a hassle. Actually it's pretty straightforward and works on anything almost.
It may not be a huge hassle but it’s still like 1000% more work than the filters. The less I have to do the better. 10-15% is wild. Even 2-3fps is more than my use of the sharpen filter on my 3080 causes.
