The Witcher 3 - Visuals

+
Status
Not open for further replies.
I know this is offtopic and should get deleted but GuyNwah and Kinley i sent you a pm and i honestly want you to respond. I am not a child to be ignored if that is the case. Sorry for the inconvenience to the rest of the forumers here but i am kinda irritated right now.
 
One of the easiest things CDPR could do to boost IQ substantially for the PC version is to allow ambient occlusion to affect the foliage; especially the grass. That would be a big improvement over what we've seen. For whatever reason, ambient occlusion doesn't seem to be affecting the grass and other smaller types of foliage, making them appear flat.

I'm hoping this changes in the final release where you can enable HBAO+..
 
Aside from this whole visual graphical stuff, this game will have trees that actually "react" to the wind, if you know what I mean. If it's windy and/or stormy these trees gunna be movin' yo.

Can't say I've played a game that will look as amazing as the Witcher 3, regardless of whether its been downgraded or not... I'm getting sick of that word.
 
Yes the skin hair and characters look like they are dipped in liquid plastic.

But the environment is properly mapped, with volumetric clouds and effects

---------- Updated at 04:14 PM ----------

This is about as pitiful as Watch Dog's headlights not casting dynamic shadows.

Water doesn't react? Blood doesn't show up? Blood turned from liquid to confetti? Grounds are a bunch of flat textures and nothing more? Water looks like jelly? Interior lighting is crap?

REALLY?

This game doesn't "set the bar" for graphics. Nor does it hold back for "consoles".

The truth is that they hold it back because they expect the average PC gamer to have like a 700 series GPU or something.

The ONLY hope..the ONLY hope left is that this is all a sort of "ruse", and true Ultra settings haven't actually been shown yet.

A 700 series GPU is more than adequate for these effects. Modders in Skyrim have added them in and they run fine on a GTX 680 4GB card. But there was a lot of very clever work done to enable this, such as Boris's ENB framework, Shearson and the SKSE team's memory enhancements (basically allowing you to offload much of what the engine wanted to store in VRAM to RAM) and a lot of work by various modders on water, atmosphere, parallax, lighting, dynamic LODs, etc. It maybe that these various techniques could not imported to consoles so they were not attempted for the PC, or that the development effort to introduce these to TW3 would have been prohibitively expensive. (After all a lot of very clever people have been building this up for free for 3+ years on Skyrim.) Another alternative is that they have spent their GPU memory and processing "budget" on hair effects, physx, etc. and there is not enough left to adequately process and render some of these other visual effects. Still, we'll have to see what CDPR has in store for us in a couple of weeks, and perhaps after they have unleashed their DLCs on us.
 
Aside from this whole visual graphical stuff, this game will have trees that actually "react" to the wind, if you know what I mean. If it's windy and/or stormy these trees gunna be movin' yo.

Can't say I've played a game that will look as amazing as the Witcher 3, regardless of whether its been downgraded or not... I'm getting sick of that word.

watch dogs and gta 5 have moving trees/foliage. Not as much as the witcher 3 obviously but its not something groundbreaking.
 
Then that's their problem. If this thread continues to go in circles like this for much longer, then we'll just have to pull the plug. It's not doing the boards any favors, in fact it's its main source of vitriol.

Any and all points have been raised, from both sides. I haven't seen anything new added to this thread in a very long time.

Personally, I'm finding it rather tiring to moderate the same thing over and over again. But that's just me.

Well that's your problem actually as a moderator, just because the forum was effectively dead after the launch of TW2 with a few key points of activity doesn't mean it won't change. The lack of activity was mainly due to the fact the forums weren't up when TW2 launched but they are up for when TW3 will and TW3 has Skyrim levels of hype. So obviously going from 2-3 dozen people at best to hundreds of people at the same time will lead to huge forum arguments, especially over this.

The expectation or demand from moderators from people to not repeat the same arguments is unreasonable given the large number of new users coming in on a daily basis. You've all made it clear you would see this thread close as you would see any and all thread where any heated debate occurs so that there is perfect harmony: Those days are over.

Closing this thread will not shut down the debate over the Visual Downgrade. It will continue getting stronger as we see more and more footage closer to release and we're getting a good amount of footage every 2-3 days. You'd only be adding more fuel to the fire.
 
Last edited:
watch dogs and gta 5 have moving trees/foliage. Not as much as the witcher 3 obviously but its not something groundbreaking.

I would assume it's a predefined animation rather than a physics-based environmental effect, otherwise the foliage would bend in response to Geralt and his horse which presumably is computationally less expensive?
 
It has nothing to do with entitlement. PC gaming enthusiasts were looking forward to a game that would push graphics to the next level. That is their hobby. When they get impression that the game has limited or reduced its graphical fidelity in order for consoles to be able to handle the it, their disappointment is understandable.

Don't get me wrong. I think the game looks gorgeous, and my 770 won't pull off ultra settings anyway. But I can understand why people voice their frustration.
 
if you look at rage and steel and pause every scene, you will see that the graphics are worse than TW2. It looks way worse than the screens being released every day and all other footage. looks like maye xone footage?
 
Can't say I've played a game that will look as amazing as the Witcher 3

I take it you aren't a PC gamer? If the current screenshots are anything to go by then on PC it is nothing special. Open world MMOs like The Secret World put the graphics to shame.
 
Still, it's a big chunk if optimized right. Games seldom use more than 2-3GB or RAM for CPU cache, so they should still have 2-3GB free for GPU which is okay for 100p. Source on PS4 operating system eating 3GB, as that sounds like a lot?
2-3 GB off GPU is only "OK". To get really good graphical effects (say 2K on pretty much all your textures and 1K on normals, (all optimized) plus parallax, etc.) and the ability to smoothly load additional objects as the character moves around, you need more like 4K plus the ability to offload VRAM to RAM - or at least that has been my experience. Of course there could be further optimization to enable you to do more with less hardware (and I'm sure they have tried to take advantage of the latest and greatest techniques), but each further increment of gain from optimization gets more expensive in terms of developer labor.

Still much of this gnashing of teeth may be premature. Much of what has been seen are YouTube videos, which themselves often have serious video quality constraints due to downloading issues, on YouTube's platform, and which suffer from degradation while being recorded due to the overhead needed to capture them for video streams - or at least this has been my experience - I can often get better looking graphics on inferior hardware compared to what someone has uploaded on YouTube. Comparing static screenshots is kind of pointless as the effect we (or I) really care about is the overall dynamic video effect in game, not the detail of a single screen shot.
 
Last edited:
So GTA V looks better than TW3? WTF
Not the clips I've seen. GTA 5 look very fake, especially the characters and objects. Some of the TW3 graphics look very natural (albeit with a "mood"). TW3 graphics and ambiance pull me into the world, GTA5 just don't. Of course this could be personal interest in the subject matter and a desire to let that happen in one case but not the other. GTA5 clips never confuse me as at whether I'm watching a clip from a movie or news item about the subject matter, TW3 clips do imitate fantasy movie clips well enough to have that effect on me.
 
Seems they're now compensating for the Dark Souls 2 / Watch Dogs bait and switch downgraded mediocre graphics by overaggerating other effects, like how thick trunked trees bend like they're made out of rubber. It looks ridiculously awful.
 
Yes I was joking sort of......still why would they waste all that time making TW3 look amazing and then just downgrade it? I understand that consoles would be downgraded but why the PC too?
 
Seems they're compensating for the bait and switch mediocre graphics by overaggerating other effects, like how thick trunked trees bend like they're made out of rubber. It looks ridiculously awful.

I really need to agree that some of the wind is just too damn much at times. Trees only bend like that when they're experiencing F5 hurricane force winds or when mt. saint helens erupts.

Something I'll hope modders will be able to fix if its as bad as I've seen in some screenshots on release day.
 
Seems they're now compensating for the Dark Souls 2 / Watch Dogs bait and switch downgraded mediocre graphics by overaggerating other effects, like how thick trunked trees bend like they're made out of rubber. It looks ridiculously awful.

I do think the wind effect is a tad overdone, especially with the big trees.
 


It's Watch Dogs all over again



GG CDProjekt Red, you're now a Ubisoft-tier dev.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom