Witcher 3 Stuttering

[bigalchubbs]

Hi everybody - so I had just about given up and resigned myself to having to use old drivers and other fixes when finally on reading the billionth post on how to potentially fix this, I found something that actually worked. Try this and see if it helps you because it completely eliminated my stuttering ON THE CURRENT NVIDIA DRIVERS (no need for rollback)

-If you are on windows 10 search for game settings and go to the game bar settings

Turn off record game clips, etc.

Turn ON open game bar

Turn ON show game bar when I play full screen

Also importantly, if you have Intel Turbo Boost 3.0, make sure to turn it off

I have no idea why, but for some reason, for me, this worked and now I have completely stutter-free gameplay for 3 hours on the current Nvidia drivers

Good luck!

 

[Razrback16]

@ derpturtel

Just curious - have you used monitoring software to watch your hardware utilization? What resolution are you playing in? I know you've tried a lot of stuff already. If I were experiencing what you're running into, here's what I would do for troubleshooting:

* Install the latest drivers
* Install MSI Afterburner and make sure it's running in the background to log GPU & CPU usage
* Turn off any other crap that's running in the background
* Turn Vsync on in the NVidia Drivers (if you're running a 144hz monitor, you might want to try half vsync / adaptive), make sure maximum performance is preferred in the drivers as well
* Go play for about 5-10 mins to generate load on the CPU / GPU so we can get some results
* Come out and take a look at the utilization and see what the results are
* If the GPU is pegged at 99-100% the whole time, back some settings down in the game as this means you're GPU limited for the IQ settings you're trying to run. You'll get stuttering if the 3d application is more demanding than GPU processing overhead is available. Ideally what you want, is with vsync turned on, you want to get the resolution and image quality settings set in a manner that you only see up to ~98% of your GPU being utilized at any given time, more preferably 90-95% so that you have a little bit of overhead still there. This will ensure the GPU doesn't get behind to where the rendering engine is waiting on it - if it gets behind and overloaded, you'll start seeing stuttering, input lag, etc. as a result.
* If you're seeing low utilization on the GPU, check your CPU and see if all of its threads are pegged at 100%. If they are, then you're CPU limited and you may need to noodle around a little to find some settings to dial down that might reduce load on the CPU (or play at higher resolution to put more load on the GPU), although with your CPU and clock speed, I doubt this is the case.
* One other thing to check with MSI Afterburner - have it watch "memory usage" on your video card as well. The 970 has like 3.5GB of usable memory - watch it to make sure it's not being pegged. If your GPU memory is pegged, you'll get stuttering / skipping just like your video on youtube showed as again, the rendering engine will be waiting on the GPU, and the GPU will be waiting on its onboard memory to refresh.

Just a few things to try there.