Can someone tell me why I am stuttering like mad in Novigrad ?
i5 2320 @ 3ghz
gtx 960
6gb ram
i5 2320 @ 3ghz
gtx 960
6gb ram
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Welcome and thank you very much for your question!
I am afraid your system configuration is not enough to go on. Could you please also tell us what your in-game settings are set to? Are you running the latest NVIDIA drivers (353.06 WHQL) and is your game patched to the latest version (v1.04)?
Hello there and thank you very much for your kind words!
I am very glad to hear that the OP helped you in fixing your random crashing, though I wouldn't have imagined that a factory overclock would be so unstable as to cause The Witcher 3 to crash. Nevertheless, this game really does seem to stress everyone's rigs to the max, so I'm not surprised that it sometimes breaks the "weakest links" in people's machines.
Have a great time playing the game now, my friend, and should you have any other questions, do not hesitate to come back here and ask!
You know, I've seen a lot of people say the game had their GPUs running at 100%, but when I was testing it, mine hovered around 60-70%. I dunno what's up with that but I realized through my own testing that the game didn't like any overclocking at all. However, since in my case my GPUs weren't seemingly being capped out memory wise, I assumed it was something weird with the game engine.
Hi Verrenus
Finally able to log in to the forum - adding my thanks for this thread. This has been a real help!
My rig is a CZ17 Valkyrie, i7 3740-QM @ 2.7 GHz
16 GB RAM
GTX-680M (4 GB VRAM)
120GB SSD
700 GB HD
Everything I have played up to now on this rig (Skyrim, FC3, DAI etc.) has been on ultra & all settings with no problem.
Once I got W3 loaded (on the SSD), even after all the Nvidia control panel & other tweaks enabled (still not able to get that blasted registry file to get witcher3.com to go on to high priority automatically), I was only able to play at 1360 x 768 fullscreen with all settings on low and no post-processing (~30 fps).
The rig didn't appear to be running hot so I didn't think too much of the overheating potential, And then, just to try every option, I hit the 'turbo fan' button, gritted my teeth due to the noise, and started up the game,
Bludieck.
WHAT a difference...
I am still playing on 1360 x 768, but now have all postprocessing at maximum (except for motion blur, vignette, chromatic aberration), graphics fullscreen with everything on ultra except for shadow & no. of background characters (medium), and foliage at high. I am running @ a pretty steady 60fps, even in Novigrad.
I am also running RTSS and found that disabling Steam lessened the occasional (temporary) framerate slowdowns as well. So far, 1.03 & 1.04 have not caused me any significant issues. Very glad for the chimney smoke addition and increased texture quality option.
Have been playing games for 23 years, and now have to say that this is the best game I have ever played, capping the original system shock.
Cheers all.
Finally able to log in to the forum - adding my thanks for this thread. This has been a real help!
My rig is a CZ17 Valkyrie, i7 3740-QM @ 2.7 GHz
16 GB RAM
GTX-680M (4 GB VRAM)
120GB SSD
700 GB HD
Everything I have played up to now on this rig (Skyrim, FC3, DAI etc.) has been on ultra & all settings with no problem.
Once I got W3 loaded (on the SSD), even after all the Nvidia control panel & other tweaks enabled (still not able to get that blasted registry file to get witcher3.com to go on to high priority automatically), I was only able to play at 1360 x 768 fullscreen with all settings on low and no post-processing (~30 fps).
The rig didn't appear to be running hot so I didn't think too much of the overheating potential, And then, just to try every option, I hit the 'turbo fan' button, gritted my teeth due to the noise, and started up the game,
Bludieck.
WHAT a difference...
I am still playing on 1360 x 768, but now have all postprocessing at maximum (except for motion blur, vignette, chromatic aberration), graphics fullscreen with everything on ultra except for shadow & no. of background characters (medium), and foliage at high. I am running @ a pretty steady 60fps, even in Novigrad.
I am also running RTSS and found that disabling Steam lessened the occasional (temporary) framerate slowdowns as well. So far, 1.03 & 1.04 have not caused me any significant issues. Very glad for the chimney smoke addition and increased texture quality option.
Have been playing games for 23 years, and now have to say that this is the best game I have ever played, capping the original system shock.
Cheers all.
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Great guide Verrenus, Thank you! Could someone help me out with these grainy shadows? Too distracting! My in-game shadow setting is High
Cheers!
http://imgur.com/AJOI8E7
Cheers!
http://imgur.com/AJOI8E7
Not only the shadows are grainy, some textures are too. And it all comes back from Witcher 2. I've decreased the Shadows quality from High to Medium and did not notice any difference, some people also advise to bring them down to Low as the difference is either marginal or simply isn't there at all.
One would think that with all the graphic downgrades CDPR would at least make the current version of the game play without a hitch.
A crowning achievement of the RPG genre...
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Thank you very much for the input, Gyrael!
Indeed, The Witcher 3 seems to loathe GPU overclocks with a passion. If there is even the tiniest instability in one's clocks, the game will most likely crash sooner or later. I was genuinely surprised to hear people downclocking even their factory overclocks just to prevent it from crashing, which I personally never had an issue with (I'm running an MSI GTX 780 Gaming Edition).
Thank you ever so much for your kind thoughts and taking the time to write!
I am glad to hear that you found the OP useful and it does seem like your rig's temperature limitations were initially keeping your GPU from boosting (i.e. automatically increasing its core clocks beyond default). That's why when you turned on the fans to full, the GPU gained some (considerable) additional thermal headroom to perform the way it should always do!
I wouldn't worry too much about the CPU high priority tweak though, since people have been getting mixed results with it. What does help, however, is setting your CPU to be the PhysX processor for your system! You can find the instructions for doing so in the OP as well.
Thank you very much for your support, K1ngFloyd!
I am afraid that this granularity is a "feature" of REDengine, since it was also present in The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. I was similarly disappointed to see that CD Projekt RED haven't been able to address this issue for The Witcher 3, but the game is just so good that I really stopped noticing all of these graphical artifacts. That might be just me though, some people are very, very conscious about their game's image quality!
---------- Updated at 10:01 AM ----------
Ok guys, so it seems that last night, after playing for 35+ hours in total, I had my first problems with The Witcher 3 in the form of a severe system lock-up that I had to "reset" out of!
It happened while I was trying to fast travel between Crow's Perch (Velen) and Woesong Bridge (White Orchard) - as soon as I double-clicked (not pressed "E" on) the Woesong Bridge fast travel point on the map, the loading screen came up, but this time the narration started to turn on and off intermittently, my framerate plummeted to "0.0" (as shown by RivaTuner Statistics Server (RTSS), which I'm using to cap the game at 60 FPS) and my system became completely unresponsive. After a few minutes of seeing that no key combination can return it to operating condition, I pressed the "Reset" button on the case with a heavy heart...
Thankfully, I save my games quite often and my save files were also completely fine after the reboot, but GOG Galaxy completely lost track of the approximately 3 hours that I was playing before the lock-up, as well as likely any achievements that I might have unlocked. I know a lot of people do not care about play timekeeping and achievements, but I'm a completionist with games that I truly love and this soured my evening somewhat.
Only after I had shutdown my PC did I realise that I hadn't checked my system's "Event Viewer" to see exactly what happened before and during the lock-up. I will do so this evening after work and report back with my findings! I personally think it was caused by memory starvation due to some weird engine bug or memory leak, but we'll have to see.
Did anything like this ever happen to you, guys? :-
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Welcome and thank you very much for your question!
I am afraid your system configuration is not enough to go on. Could you please also tell us what your in-game settings are set to? Are you running the latest NVIDIA drivers (353.06 WHQL) and is your game patched to the latest version (v1.04)?
I am stuttering only when in towns, also at any quality level or resolution, I have tried every tweak including reinstalling windows and the game itself. I'm thinking it's my processor because when I enter these demanding areas my processor cores at all at press much 95%. Yes I have latest driver and latest game version.. Is 3 ghz enough to run this game in novigrad ? It's weird because i can play the game on ultra locked at 30 fps but when I cap the framerate to 60 the framerate goes up and down on any quality / resolution, pretty sure it's my weak processor .
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i found a video detailling a method that improoves TW3 performance and help you get rid of lag/stuttering.
hope this will help
I can't tell you for sure that it's an issue with your shadow cascade distance, but this dithering effect is used in the game to blend between shadow cascades. Most usually you will see this issue indoors.
It seems that in some cases the other cascades might "turn off" so you're left with that dithering pattern. In the case of interiors it makes sense to turn off the outer cascades for performance, though I'm not sure why exactly you have the issue there. I believe it's possible that only certain "resolution" meshes get entered into the closest shadow cascade. In your case that geometry (the overhang) is rather thin so it might not be present in the second shadow cascade, only in the first. So when the engine blends the cascades with the dithering pattern you get that artifact.
I discovered that to alleviate this issue you just increase (in user.settings):
Code:
CascadeShadowDistanceScale0=1to
Code:
CascadeShadowDistanceScale0=2CascadeShadowDistanceScale0=1
CascadeShadowDistanceScale0=2
(Best to view the images full-size since the dithering pattern gets hidden otherwise)
DISCLAIMER
I haven't tested this thoroughly to see if there are any negative effects, as I haven't really been playing since I was hit with the "No XP" glitch.
If increasing the CascadeShadowDistanceScale* values stretches out each cascade a little further than the default, then it's theoretically possible that you will notice a slight decrease in apparent shadow resolution ("quality"). However I didn't personally notice any.
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Lower is better with mip bias. Don't go below -1.0 though.
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I am afraid that this granularity is a "feature" of REDengine, since it was also present in The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. I was similarly disappointed to see that CD Projekt RED haven't been able to address this issue for The Witcher 3, but the game is just so good that I really stopped noticing all of these graphical artifacts. That might be just me though, some people are very, very conscious about their game's image quality!
It is a feature, no quotes. It blends between the shadow cascades, or to fade distant shadows into the scene less noticeably (no "popping"). See above for my fix, but especially my post here with a detailed explanation (I'm the second comment).
The reason it's dithered and not smooth is highly technical, but suffice to say it's much more graphics intensive to do alpha blending instead of this dithering effect. Here's some reading though, and this too.
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I did some investigating and your CPU actually doesn't meet the game's minimum CPU requirement (i.e. i5-2500k), so it's pretty remarkable that you can run The Witcher 3 as well as you are now! CPU upgrades are a lot more daunting than GPU ones, but your motherboard will support an upgrade to the latest Ivy bridge models, such as the i5-3570k or i7-3770k. Upgrading to any of those would give you a sizable performance boost, but I would personally recommend the former, since I have been using it without issue since 2012, and that's while being overclocked to 4.4 Ghz!
i found a video detailling a method that improoves TW3 performance and help you get rid of lag/stuttering.
hope this will help
Thank you very much for sharing this with us!
I don't think any of this will make a noticeable difference in-game, especially since the video author is also using the in-game 60 FPS limiter which has been known to introduce frame-pacing issues (i.e. stuttering) in and of itself. Of course, this might be useful to people who have implemented too many tweaks and lost track of them, but I personally think this is just placebo.
Oh wow, thank you very much for the fix and the detailed explanation, jonwd7! I honestly wasn't familiar with any of the technical aspects, but from a performance perspective it does make a lot of sense to go with this dithering effect. REDengine really does seem like a great piece of software!
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Just to let ye guys know, seeing as they've been mentioned a few times above: the CascadeShadowDistanceScale (0-3) parameters affect shadow map resolution. Based on their scale.
Increasing these values, decreases the resolution of shadows with every increase. It's only especially noticeable on the DistanceScale0, as it affects all shadows in close proximity, including Geralt's self shadowing. It can get blocky looking on a value greater than 2.
A lot of the shadow values can also cause worsening of the shadow culling / downscaling based on camera position / direction. The values that worked best from my own testing, that eliminated this as much as I could, are below;
CascadeShadowDistanceScale0=1.5
CascadeShadowDistanceScale1=3.0
CascadeShadowDistanceScale2=2.5
CascadeShadowDistanceScale3=2.0
Another few 'advisements';
Don't mess with CascadeShadowFadeTreshold, ie don't go below 1.0
I also personally use MaxTerrainShadowAtlasCount=5, MaxCascadeCount=5 (5 seems valid max), CascadeShadowQuality=4. They basically ensure, that everything that should have a shadow, does have one.
I also personally have my shadow map res set to 2048 base. As increasing their base res, seems to do very little. The engine seems to want to make them whatever bloody res it likes anyway. And this increases performance, allowing for 'more' shadowing.
From my own observations increasing all of the "safe" params, for more shadowing overall. Looks much nicer, than fewer, higher res ones.
Increasing these values, decreases the resolution of shadows with every increase. It's only especially noticeable on the DistanceScale0, as it affects all shadows in close proximity, including Geralt's self shadowing. It can get blocky looking on a value greater than 2.
A lot of the shadow values can also cause worsening of the shadow culling / downscaling based on camera position / direction. The values that worked best from my own testing, that eliminated this as much as I could, are below;
CascadeShadowDistanceScale0=1.5
CascadeShadowDistanceScale1=3.0
CascadeShadowDistanceScale2=2.5
CascadeShadowDistanceScale3=2.0
Another few 'advisements';
Don't mess with CascadeShadowFadeTreshold, ie don't go below 1.0
I also personally use MaxTerrainShadowAtlasCount=5, MaxCascadeCount=5 (5 seems valid max), CascadeShadowQuality=4. They basically ensure, that everything that should have a shadow, does have one.
I also personally have my shadow map res set to 2048 base. As increasing their base res, seems to do very little. The engine seems to want to make them whatever bloody res it likes anyway. And this increases performance, allowing for 'more' shadowing.
From my own observations increasing all of the "safe" params, for more shadowing overall. Looks much nicer, than fewer, higher res ones.
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Thank you very much jonwd7! for your detailed reply. I understand is not a fix, but if this tweak reduces this problem it deserves the 1st page. I will test when I get back from work.
I just cant stop playing this wonderful game. I'm so immersed and Ive been training my eyes to not get distracted too much with the various annoyances I encountered. Hopefully most of them will eventually get fixed/modded. I didn't stop because of the XP glitch, I feel a little bit over-leveled anyways...
Lets hope patch 1.05 works as intended!
Cheers!
I just cant stop playing this wonderful game. I'm so immersed and Ive been training my eyes to not get distracted too much with the various annoyances I encountered. Hopefully most of them will eventually get fixed/modded. I didn't stop because of the XP glitch, I feel a little bit over-leveled anyways...
Lets hope patch 1.05 works as intended!
Cheers!
Just for other people reading who may be confused by this, increasing the value does not strictly decrease the total size of the shadow map for that cascade. It decreases the apparent resolution of the shadows in that cascade because it's covering a greater distance. So the tradeoff is rather fair. It puts the cascade transitions further away from you, and avoids the issue with the wonky interior shadows (for the 0 cascade).
However, when doubling CascadeShadowDistanceScale0 I didn't notice even the slightest difference in apparent resolution (with side-by-side image comparisons), which I thought was odd, so I'm guessing with my shadow resolution being at 3072, and with the closest cascade being so small, that doubling the distance only makes minute differences... But I was wondering if you happen to have any good image comparisons which show that it's actually pretty detrimental?
Also, do you have better image comparisons of CascadeShadowQuality=4 than the Nvidia article? I thought their comparison made the shadows look rather awful at 4.. too chunky. I actually don't even understand what the value means, and I intimately know the technology behind cascaded shadow mapping. Is it doing supersampling when rendering the shadow mapping frustums perchance?
(Edit: I am betting Nvidia switched the images accidentally. The CascadeShadowQuality=1 has higher resolution without doubt.. look at the two trees above Geralt's head and slightly to the right)
I use
Code:
[Rendering]
CascadeShadowQuality=1
CascadeShadowDistanceScale0=2
CascadeShadowDistanceScale1=2
CascadeShadowDistanceScale2=2.5
CascadeShadowDistanceScale3=2.5in conjunction with:
Code:
[Rendering/SpeedTree]
GrassDistanceScale=2.4
FoliageDistanceScale=2.4
FoliageShadowDistanceScale=72
GrassRingSize=8388608so that distant trees are more well shadowed. Here is a gallery comparison of that. (Click "All" at the bottom and then "Fullscreen" in the sidebar to easily see them full-size)
Do you have any reason for putting CascadeShadowDistanceScale1 all the way to 3?
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Also, MaxCascadeCount=5 would imply that you should have a CascadeShadowDistanceScale4 in your INI. Have you found if this works? Because 5 cascades equals Scale0, Scale1, Scale2, Scale3, Scale4.
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i don't know if reloading the save fixed the problem or the integrity check i did...anyway somehow is fixed
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