A compendium of tweaks and fixes for the PC version

[Geralt_of_bsas]

Well i tried the New Beta driver 15.8 but still same problem :/

Unfortunately in my experience AMD have always taken a very long time to fix the classic crossfire flickering, one thing you could try, if you think it's worth it, is to actually use an older driver that you havent tested yet, but honestly I'd just disable crossfire altogether, I know it's really hard to give away the performance but flickering crap is really annoying, especially if its every shadow like I had in several games.

 

[Darkcore1991]

Unfortunately in my experience AMD have always taken a very long time to fix the classic crossfire flickering, one thing you could try, if you think it's worth it, is to actually use an older driver that you havent tested yet, but honestly I'd just disable crossfire altogether, I know it's really hard to give away the performance but flickering crap is really annoying, especially if its every shadow like I had in several games.

i tried to play it with dat flickering but as u say its very hard to play with dat issue. Now i playing a Witcher 3 with 38 Fps and can only pray dat amd will fix this...:/

 

[arvydasb]

Those user and user.settings files are strange. They are exactly the same, and game is reading settings from user.settings, because removing user file and keeping user.settings doesn't cause settings back to default, it happens only when you remove user.settings, but editing values in user.settings makes no difference. You have to edit user file and when you launch game everything you done in user file is transported to user.settings and game is reading from it, even though changing vaules in this file makes no difference. Pretty strange, but this is the way it works. I also made user.settings read only.

The files are actually user.settings and user.settings.bak.
On your Windows it is probably configured that known file extensions are hidden. So if you, for example, when opening these files for the first time chose to always open them with Notepad, Windows considers extentions .settings and .bak to be known and simply hides them, so you now see those files as "user" and "user.settings". I believe first is the main file and second is the backup. So if there is no main file, settings are being read from the backup and main file is recreated from that. If you change settings in the backup, but the main file is still present, it reads settings from the main and copies them over to the backup. It is quite logical.

 

[AkaGrey]

hello guys, I have a huge problem it appears.
The game after the latest patch won't start. I double-click, and after 10 seconds, it appears the crashlogo.
On older patcher works flawlessy.. Vanilla game.
I get the same error as in this thread :

http://forums.cdprojektred.com/threads/57334-witcher3-exe_crash_20150802_044509809?p=1906423#post1906423

Looking around , and reading, it seems something involved with the nvidia settings, but even with default on the control panel, nothing changes.
Anybody else have this problem?

 

[tomb888]

Hello,
My game minimizes every few minutes and I don't get it back.I know there is many people who have the same problem.I have tried numerous possible fixes but game is still unplayable for me.
My specs are:
Geforce GTX 760
i5 4430 3.00 GHz
12 GB RAM
Not the best specs but those should handle W3.

 

[CarolKarine]

The files are actually user.settings and user.settings.bak.
On your Windows it is probably configured that known file extensions are hidden. So if you, for example, when opening these files for the first time chose to always open them with Notepad, Windows considers extentions .settings and .bak to be known and simply hides them, so you now see those files as "user" and "user.settings". I believe first is the main file and second is the backup. So if there is no main file, settings are being read from the backup and main file is recreated from that. If you change settings in the backup, but the main file is still present, it reads settings from the main and copies them over to the backup. It is quite logical.

I'm unable to get my user.settings file (I have known extensions showing) to read new changes in game. I know it's reading old changes, because my grass ring is still around a 3 value, while my shadow tweaks aren't taking at all.

what I'm doing is editing my user.settings and then setting it to read-only, and then launching the game. am i missing a step? I don't remember what I did to get it to read my grass ring size.

 

[MonarchX]

Damn, I lost my user.settings file and now I cannot find that light tweak... It was a user.settings tweak that improved lighting...

 

[berserker66666]

So guys, about those texture popping......well CarolKarine is looking into fixing it. Check it out.

http://forums.cdprojektred.com/threads/57308-LoD-Research-Thread?p=1908718#post1908718

 

[arvydasb]

I'm unable to get my user.settings file (I have known extensions showing) to read new changes in game. I know it's reading old changes, because my grass ring is still around a 3 value, while my shadow tweaks aren't taking at all.

what I'm doing is editing my user.settings and then setting it to read-only, and then launching the game. am i missing a step? I don't remember what I did to get it to read my grass ring size.

Not sure why it doesn't work, but try making a copy of your current settings, then delete both user.settings and user.settings.bak, launch game for it to recreate those files, then go through user.settings and change settings by comparing with your saved copy - maybe you will discover why it isn't working. Also I don't bother setting the file to read only and didn't have issues with it. Maybe I wasn't changing the "right" settings .
Also if you set some of the values out of range, the game seems to fix that - maybe if it can't fix it because the file is read only, and the value is out of range, it breaks something.
Also before making some additional tweaks, I usually make the backup of the current file so I could revert to the settings that worked.

 

[Verrenus]

Damn, I lost my user.settings file and now I cannot find that light tweak... It was a user.settings tweak that improved lighting...

Asmodean778 did post a few tweaks that purportedly enhanced lighting quality a short while after the game launched, but other users have since then demonstrated with screenshots that the tweaks had no effect at all on image quality. Do you remember anything about the tweak that you lost, maybe I can try to find it in an older post? ???

 

[VeryHot]

Hi.

I'm playing on an i3-3110M CPU, HD 8670M graphics card and 4GB RAM. I have always been able to play recent games with very low settings. Games like Borderlands 2 have extreme customization and I can even run them at 60fps.

However, even the lowest settings in Witcher 3 aren't enough to give me over 20 fps, most of the time even lower.

Has anyone released a compressed textures mod or a user config file that would correspond to some sort of UltraLow setings?

 

[shishimaru1000]

Yes, me. My video card is even a 540m and has a better DirectX 9 score than yours, but yours has definitely a better score on DirectX 11 (which is Witcher 3). Honestly, if you can afford to play at least on 15 fps you're definitey lucky.

Anyway, I tweaked a little some files and activated pre-rendered frames. It's almost playable, but it's not stable. I lose fps after a while and in the fog or rain I lose a lot. Witcher 3 is... smooth at 15 fps, but if it goes lower... meh.

Btw, I think you can enable texturedownscale, but to me it didn't make good.

I'm still trying to figure out what's making me lose frames. Maybe the memory buffer is low and so exploring the world makes the game bad with performance. Have no idea.

 

[KRZYCH04650]

I have tried 2343892482374823 of settings in user.settings and .ini files but nothing can help this ridiculous LOD. Is there really nothing we can do about it? I am talking to NPC and I see textures from 10 ages ago few meters behind me! Just:

 

[marvelmaster]

I have tried 2343892482374823 of settings in user.settings and .ini files but nothing can help this ridiculous LOD. Is there really nothing we can do about it? I am talking to NPC and I see textures from 10 ages ago few meters behind me!

LOD MOD Thread
http://forums.cdprojektred.com/threads/57308-LoD-Research-Thread

Hi.

I'm playing on an i3-3110M CPU, HD 8670M graphics card and 4GB RAM. I have always been able to play recent games with very low settings. Games like Borderlands 2 have extreme customization and I can even run them at 60fps.

However, even the lowest settings in Witcher 3 aren't enough to give me over 20 fps, most of the time even lower.

Has anyone released a compressed textures mod or a user config file that would correspond to some sort of UltraLow setings?

Removing Gras! english description below video!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxDyikV8Akk

 

[Kidoki]

Is it normal to have A LOT of aliasing (especially on Novigrad) that is very noticeable while moving? Especially on some objects and windows, even when relatively close to them.
SMAA from SweetFX doesn't help much regarding this.
The negative MipBias also doesn't affect this too much (tested it at 0 and -0.7).
I don't use sharpening.

I play at at 1080p and sometimes on a resolution that is a bit higher using DSR. I'm asking if this is normal because i don't remember if it was this bad on release, maybe it was and i started to care too much about it.

I know this also happens in other games, but in W3 it distracts me a lot.

 

[Verrenus]

Updated the OP with the latest version of SweetFX/ReShade (2.0 Preview 8 with ReShade 1.0.0), as well as new instructions on how to use it with your game!

Is it normal to have A LOT of aliasing (especially on Novigrad) that is very noticeable while moving? Especially on some objects and windows, even when relatively close to them. I know this also happens in other games, but in W3 it distracts me a lot.

I have been noticing this issue myself, but I simply ignore it since there's not much that can be done about it. NVIDIA's TXAA was specifically designed to combat such aliasing, but The Witcher 3 doesn't make use of it. Any "TextureMipBias" setting apart from "0" will, however, make the aliasing worse. This is one of the reasons I disabled it altogether in my working config, as listed in the OP!

 

[Matvs]

Greetings guys. I have a question about the shadows. I've tweaked the following values:

CascadeShadowDistanceScale0=2
CascadeShadowDistanceScale1=2
CascadeShadowDistanceScale2=2.5
CascadeShadowDistanceScale3=2.5

It helped me a lot, but I still noticing many shadows to pop in. Would you recommend to set those values even higher? Did you tweak the shadows somewhat further Verrenus?

Best thread out there by far, cheers!

 

[nAKAZZ]

With a few tweaks + a lighting mod + custom reshade preset, what awesome visuals we can get :










By the way, is there any screenshots dedicated thread ?

 

[Kidoki]

@nKZz Yes. Here you go.

 

[Verrenus]

Greetings guys. I have a question about the shadows. I've tweaked the following values:

CascadeShadowDistanceScale0=2
CascadeShadowDistanceScale1=2
CascadeShadowDistanceScale2=2.5
CascadeShadowDistanceScale3=2.5

It helped me a lot, but I still noticing many shadows to pop in. Would you recommend to set those values even higher? Did you tweak the shadows somewhat further Verrenus?

Best thread out there by far, cheers!

Thank you very much for the kind words, my friend!

A few patches ago, those values made a significant difference and actually fixed shadow pop-in. Unfortunately, they don't seem to have as much of a beneficial effect since the 1.07-1.08 patches rolled in. The following increased values started being circulated on NeoGAF and even in this thread, but I'm not sure if they really improve things or not:

CascadeShadowDistanceScale0=3
CascadeShadowDistanceScale1=3
CascadeShadowDistanceScale2=4
CascadeShadowDistanceScale3=4

Perhaps you can try them and report back with your findings, should you find the time? I would really appreciate if someone could do that!