A compendium of tweaks and fixes for the PC version

[S-a-y]

That sucks big time. Iwinski did say that the core group of devs is still working on TW3 Expansions but more and more people are taking up Cyberpunk. So they've not completely abandoned TW3 but at the same time more people switching to another project is a sign of things to come or in this case not to come.

Without REDKit all effforts are practically in vain.

I wish we could've gotten this.

I dont know, what is wrong? I'm ok with visual that I have right now...

Few of my screens (not best that I could get, but good enough):














Whole album here.

 

[bombeybox]

I dont know, what is wrong?

Omg, lightning is different, grass is different, sign effects\particles\even colors is different, shading is different\view distance is different etc.
Dont post this ugly screens here anymore, it's tweak thread, where we trying to make this shit looks like it must be.

 

[Wulfric5]

Omg, lightning is different, grass is different, sign effects\particles\even colors is different, shading is different\view distance is different etc.
Dont post this ugly screens here anymore, it's tweak thread, where we trying to make this shit looks like it must be.

He can post whatever he wants as long as it's related to the thread, unlike yours.

 

[IrregularJohn]

i literally died when i saw it. that's the power of the pc master race: you can play at any settings you want, ultra or uber-low.


yeah i feel the same, even modding and tweaking is starting to slow down considerably whenever i check on the nexusmods. case and point: the REDkit 2 needs to come out, or we will be still stuck this way.

Agreed. Been watching more vids about nVidia Gameworks and how nVidia basically cripples performance not only on AMD GPUs but on their own GPUs as well. Now it is a double-edge sword situation: on one hand nVidia policy does hurt healthy competition, but on the other hand if you have a competetive advantage over your main rival why would you give out all the info about it - that would simply negate your whole advantage.


What I find more irritating is nVidia's practices in terms of its own cards:


1) Basically all non-Maxwell series GPUs are not optimised (or the drivers are not optimised) to run The Witcher 3. They can't realise their whole potential. GTX780 (don't remember if it's a regular 780 or 780Ti) have a marginal advantage over GTX960 which is the low-end card.


2) In relation to Gameworks, the only feature that is present in TW3 at the moment is HairWorks which cripples performance not only on AMD cards or 600 and 700 series nVidia GPUs but also in Maxwell GPUs - the ones that were heavily advertised with the game and were sold as a bundle where you'd get the game for free. That is mind-boggling and aggravating to say the least.


Now I understand the nVidia Gameworks includes a whole array of effects besides Hairworks and we got only a low version of Hairworks in the final build. That is something to ponder on.

 

[essenthy]

@S-a-y sick screen shots man !! good work

 

[StuntZA]

I dont know, what is wrong? I'm ok with visual that I have right now...

Few of my screens (not best that I could get, but good enough):














Whole album here.

Dude, please share your PC specs, mods you use and your tweaks? I'd really highly appreciate it! Brilliant screenshots!

Omg, lightning is different, grass is different, sign effects\particles\even colors is different, shading is different\view distance is different etc.
Dont post this ugly screens here anymore, it's tweak thread, where we trying to make this shit looks like it must be.

(ಠ_ಠ)

 

[essenthy]

Agreed. Been watching more vids about nVidia Gameworks and how nVidia basically cripples performance not only on AMD GPUs but on their own GPUs as well. Now it is a double-edge sword situation: on one hand nVidia policy does hurt healthy competition, but on the other hand if you have a competetive advantage over your main rival why would you give out all the info about it - that would simply negate your whole advantage.


What I find more irritating is nVidia's practices in terms of its own cards:


1) Basically all non-Maxwell series GPUs are not optimised (or the drivers are not optimised) to run The Witcher 3. They can't realise their whole potential. GTX780 (don't remember if it's a regular 780 or 780Ti) have a marginal advantage over GTX960 which is the low-end card.


2) In relation to Gameworks, the only feature that is present in TW3 at the moment is HairWorks which cripples performance not only on AMD cards or 600 and 700 series nVidia GPUs but also in Maxwell GPUs - the ones that were heavily advertised with the game and were sold as a bundle where you'd get the game for free. That is mind-boggling and aggravating to say the least.


Now I understand the nVidia Gameworks includes a whole array of effects besides Hairworks and we got only a low version of Hairworks in the final build. That is something to ponder on.

yeah but no sorry, this is getting really irritating, always blaming gameworks by ignorance because of shitty outsourced/internal ports

unless you have direct proof of nvidia deliberately CRIPPLING games, please stop posting this false stupid assumptions, they bundle and sell games with their video cards since ages now, why in hell would they cripple your game that you just got for free by buying one of their cards ? do you realize how stupid this sound ? do you know about consumers rights ? refunds ?

how can you even believe that they can cripple games of big publisher like WarnerBros or Ubisoft ( who are so much bigger than Nvidia they could buy them 3 times ) and that they would LET THEME do it ? like how ? " go fuck up our PC ports and ruin our reputation, just because you gave us some money " you serious ? you think these publishers needs Nvidia money ?

gameworks code is closed of course it will run like shit on AMD cards, should it be open so everyone can enjoy it ? yes ! is nvidia that stupid to cripple AMD cards ? surely not , and how about this ; how about AMD get their fingers out of their asses and start making decent GC that dont burn your house and your bills ? peoples are literally blaming nvidia for having a technological EDGE over AMD

and about Kepler GPUs , i have a friend who play W3 with a 780 on ultra at 55-60 fps, since day 1, so yeah i stopped to believe this as soon as i heard about his setup

HairWorks, lets see ... even their latest most powerful GPU cant run it properly at high resolutions, you think they are crippling their own freaking high end cards ? maybe hairworks is a tech too advanced for maxwell ? let alone kepler ?!

am not defending Nvidia , am tired of reading these baseless accusation that peoples are swalowing like ultimate truth, if anything AMD should be criticized for their lack of efforts, i want AMD to challenge Nvidia so that they feel threatened and lower prices/make better tech, and surely not BLAME NVIDIA FOR AMD INCOMPETENCE

 

[IrregularJohn]

@essenthy, relax, dude. Hairworks does lead to massive fps drop on nVidia cards and their latest ones to boot. No need for personal attacks here. For the record I didn't get the game for free. I bought my 970 in December - way before their bundle promo thing was even announced. Where did I say that AMD is a victim here and nVidia should just give them the source code?

Why get your panties in a knot over this?

 

[MUPPETA]

HairWorks, lets see ... even their latest most powerful GPU cant run it properly at high resolutions, you think they are crippling their own freaking high end cards ? maybe hairworks is a tech too advanced for maxwell ? let alone kepler ?!

well, do you remember NVDIA demo -A new dawn
on my gtx 980 and i7-2600k I have 60 fps.
on Witcher3 I have 45-47 enabling hairworks, without 60-78
(And I'm talking only hairworks for Geralt)

 

[essenthy]

well, do you remember NVDIA demo -A new dawn
on my gtx 980 and i7-2600k I have 60 fps.
on Witcher3 I have 45-47 enabling hairworks, without 60-78
(And I'm talking only hairworks for Geralt)

are you really comparing a tech demo where ther's literally nothing running around beside that small microscopic scene with 1 single model to a full open world with sub systems like W3 ? i have the same fps as you, and am fine with it, actually i would have preferred the more advanced CDPR hair animations that was downgraded from the 35mn gameplay demo, look way better than spaghetti geralt

@IrregularJohn : you know nothing john snow

 

[IrregularJohn]

are you really comparing a tech demo where ther's literally nothing running around beside that small microscopic scene with 1 single model to a full open world with sub systems like W3 ? i have the same fps as you, and am fine with it, actually i would have preferred the more advanced CDPR hair animations that was downgraded from the 35mn gameplay demo, look way better than spaghetti geralt

@IrregularJohn : you know nothing john snow

You're certainly the know-it-all around here. Keep nurturing your ego, dude. Seriously.

 

[essenthy]

You're certainly the know-it-all around here. Keep nurturing your ego, dude. Seriously.

wow someone need a joke detector , anyway you are free to continue to whine and complains for eternity if you want

 

[S-a-y]

Dude, please share your PC specs, mods you use and your tweaks? I'd really highly appreciate it! Brilliant screenshots!

Thanks=) I posted my setting few post earlier. I also use tweaked ReShade framework based on "confidence mans" setting. Free camera is from debug console mode. Specs are in my signature.

 

[Black_Iris]

gameworks code is closed of course it will run like shit on AMD cards, should it be open so everyone can enjoy it ? yes ! is nvidia that stupid to cripple AMD cards ? surely not , and how about this ; how about AMD get their fingers out of their asses and start making decent GC that dont burn your house and your bills ? peoples are literally blaming nvidia for having a technological EDGE over AMD

Of what are you talking about ffs? It's so obvious you have no idea of what you are talking about here. AMD already HAS a much better competiton to many of the effects present in gameworks and they are ALL perfectly open to be shared with NVDIA for optimization. However Nvidia, having more resources, can gather many more exclusives than AMD can and uses those exclusives to FORCE devs to use their technology that not only is poor optimized but it is also a closed box and devs cannot (by contract with the same Nvidia) give AMD any direction to optimize their drivers to work with that technology.

There's NOTHING good in what Nvidia is doing and if you agree with this behavior you are practically spelling the end of ANY freedom of yourself as an user to choose the product you prefer and for devs to program their software for every platform independently from marketing mechanics. Can you imagine if what Nvidia is doing becoming the norm? You would have games that would work on a card manufacturer only and not because they couldn't work in the other lines for lack of performance or technology, but just because that manufacturer is actively blocking the devs to develop code for the other lines, even when those lines have comparable technologies that are even better than what they are forced to use by contract.

Nvidia in the past AGREED with AMD to never actively block developers of games to optimize code of technolgy for the other line, and AMD always respected their side of the accord. They had a MUCH BETTER hairworks physics that Nvidia has, for example (TressFX is miles above Hairworks both in rendering quality and performance), and they had no problems whatsoever on sharing tidbits of code so Nvidia could optimize their drivers for it. Instead Nvidia has this crappy technology that works like trash that, however, they use as a sort of way to cripple performance on AMD cards mechanically, just because they cannot optimize their drivers for it. And the fun part is that not only it cripples AMD but it does the same to themselves! It is becoming the joke of the century in tech journals.

At this point gameworks is more used by Nvidia as a back-handed wat to cripple the FPS of AMD and to evidence its power share than for a real technology advancement, since it sucks in that department. There's not even a game for now that can utilize that technology with good performance and results. EVERY game that has gameworks enabled has every sort of problems with performance, even with Maxwell cards that should supposedly be made for it, and the effects are neither good to begin with (and devs are either forced then to bring them down even more to have decent performance).

How can people defend this thing is beyond me, seriously. At last stop with this pantomime that's somewhat the fault of AMD for not doing their work. They already have much better technologies than gameworks has, what they should do? At this point you are actively blaming AMD for not being as powerful a giant as Nvidia is, since games exclusives are taken by the part that has the more money to pay (and the interest in it, naturally), nothing else.

 

[Zaeccis]

checking in after few weeks and no new mods (as no REDKIT) but instead this has gone into NVIDIA vs. AMD forum.
And again everyone has so black and white views here, you really think this is so simple?

Yes, Nvidia has propietary technologies like hairworks but does that really make them bad company? What does Nvidia corporation exist for? To give you great gaming experience? No, its meaning is to make money. So of course it will do everything legally in its power to turn customers away from other competitors (AMD). What do expect? Nvidia is owned by its investors who decide what kind of strategy it utilizes. And it's not like AMD doesn't try to use propietary techs *cough* mantle *cough*.

I would like to see more competition in GPU field, it's always healthy, but can you really expect company to act against it's own benefit? If so, you really have no idea how business world works. If Nvidia suddenly decided to share their tech and start "let's play fair" model, what do you expect investors would do? No more investors, no more nvidia.

And to say AMD has better techonlogy but can't compete because all games are optimized for Nvidia, well lets take out some cold facts.http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-radeon-r9-fury-x,4196-4.html
Battlefield 4, AMD OPTIMIZED GAME, gtx 980ti (nvidia flagship) and fury x (amd flagship), EQUALLY PRIZED, and nvidia card is gets better fps.
On the same page, Far cry 4 which is Nvidia optimized game, Amd gets better fps than gtx980ti or titan x (!)

Just try to understand that it's not so simple "Nvidia blocking AMD by forcing developers to optimize fro Nvidia" case.
And as said before, how do think Nvidia could force any of big publishers to make games only supporting Nvidia cards?
Nvidia is small company compared to them. Nvidia can't pay enough for them to make games that AMD users couldn't use.
And when both current gen consoles use AMD GPUs amd-optimization is must have these days. (and in this generation console and pc architecture are so close to each other console amd optimizations carry to pc much better)



Oh and just comparing Nvidia hairworks and mad tressfx, Only place where I have really seen tressfx is tomb raider and compared to that Nvidia hairworks looks better. Of course it's more performance intensive but ,well, that's how better looking effects tend to be.

I have no preference between NVIDIA and AMD but instead pick whatever is best when I'm upgrading, lately it's been Nvidia. I hope AMD gets better again but before that, please try to lose that fan-boyism and look things more objectively.

 

[S-a-y]

Few more test screenshots (a lot of tweaking, but fully playable on GTX960 - over 30 FPS):













Tell me what you think? Dat DoF make a big difference...

 

[essenthy]

Of what are you talking about ffs? It's so obvious you have no idea of what you are talking about here. AMD already HAS a much better competiton to many of the effects present in gameworks and they are ALL perfectly open to be shared with NVDIA for optimization. However Nvidia, having more resources, can gather many more exclusives than AMD can and uses those exclusives to FORCE devs to use their technology that not only is poor optimized but it is also a closed box and devs cannot (by contract with the same Nvidia) give AMD any direction to optimize their drivers to work with that technology.

There's NOTHING good in what Nvidia is doing and if you agree with this behavior you are practically spelling the end of ANY freedom of yourself as an user to choose the product you prefer and for devs to program their software for every platform independently from marketing mechanics. Can you imagine if what Nvidia is doing becoming the norm? You would have games that would work on a card manufacturer only and not because they couldn't work in the other lines for lack of performance or technology, but just because that manufacturer is actively blocking the devs to develop code for the other lines, even when those lines have comparable technologies that are even better than what they are forced to use by contract.

Nvidia in the past AGREED with AMD to never actively block developers of games to optimize code of technolgy for the other line, and AMD always respected their side of the accord. They had a MUCH BETTER hairworks physics that Nvidia has, for example (TressFX is miles above Hairworks both in rendering quality and performance), and they had no problems whatsoever on sharing tidbits of code so Nvidia could optimize their drivers for it. Instead Nvidia has this crappy technology that works like trash that, however, they use as a sort of way to cripple performance on AMD cards mechanically, just because they cannot optimize their drivers for it. And the fun part is that not only it cripples AMD but it does the same to themselves! It is becoming the joke of the century in tech journals.

At this point gameworks is more used by Nvidia as a back-handed wat to cripple the FPS of AMD and to evidence its power share than for a real technology advancement, since it sucks in that department. There's not even a game for now that can utilize that technology with good performance and results. EVERY game that has gameworks enabled has every sort of problems with performance, even with Maxwell cards that should supposedly be made for it, and the effects are neither good to begin with (and devs are either forced then to bring them down even more to have decent performance).

How can people defend this thing is beyond me, seriously. At last stop with this pantomime that's somewhat the fault of AMD for not doing their work. They already have much better technologies than gameworks has, what they should do? At this point you are actively blaming AMD for not being as powerful a giant as Nvidia is, since games exclusives are taken by the part that has the more money to pay (and the interest in it, naturally), nothing else.

maybe if you bother to read what i said you wouldnt rage that much

am not defending Nvidia , am tired of reading these baseless accusation that peoples are swalowing like ultimate truth, if anything AMD should be criticized for their lack of efforts, i want AMD to challenge Nvidia so that they feel threatened and lower prices/make better tech, and surely not BLAME NVIDIA FOR AMD INCOMPETENCE

calling TressFx better is a joke, it had the same performance problems as Hairwork ( tomb raider is the only game that used it unless am missing something ), and of course it look nicer on one single longer haired female character than an old ass Witcher with shorter hair and his horse ... and some monsters around... at the same time ... in an open world

but you wanna be blind so whatever, both tressfx and hairwork looks like spaghetti for me and its gonna take some years before we can get nice implementations like they are showcased in demos , what worry me more is better/looking tech like CDPR had in the 35mn demo for example that was heavily toned down in favor of hairworks, that look average at best in its implementation and is a resources hog

AMD could make some efforts instead of playing the victim and call gamers at their defense , and unless you prove wrong, even without gameworks AMD cards are still below Nvidia in term of performance in general, even the fury x .. so whats the excuse here ? nvidia implemented some secret codes to cripple AMD cards, in games they dont own ?

and let me remind you something , the very consoles that are the source of PC enthusiast problems with downgrade and shitty ports are powered by AMD GPU/CPU, the company that you are defending , so yeah .. you could say that AMD is just a manufacturer and ultimately is making a product tailored for its client ( sony/microsoft ), but they are 800mhz gpu with notebook grade cpu wich are holding PC gaming since years now

 

[Black_Iris]

Yes, Nvidia has propietary technologies like hairworks but does that really make them bad company? What does Nvidia corporation exist for? To give you great gaming experience? No, its meaning is to make money. So of course it will do everything legally in its power to turn customers away from other competitors (AMD). What do expect? Nvidia is owned by its investors who decide what kind of strategy it utilizes. And it's not like AMD doesn't try to use propietary techs *cough* mantle *cough*.

Again. Both manufactures have their own technology firms but BOTH agreed on not adopting a closed box approach to them and let the other side being able to optimize their drivers to work with them. AMD always did it (to the point with TressFX to even working with Nvidia itself directly to have them optimize their drivers code for it) and it is Nvidia that, suddenly, broke that agreement with no motive whatsoever (because, frankly, there's nothing gamebreaking in gameworks technology).

And to say AMD has better techonlogy but can't compete because all games are optimized for Nvidia, well lets take out some cold facts.http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-radeon-r9-fury-x,4196-4.html
Battlefield 4, AMD OPTIMIZED GAME, gtx 980ti (nvidia flagship) and fury x (amd flagship), EQUALLY PRIZED, and nvidia card is gets better fps.
On the same page, Far cry 4 which is Nvidia optimized game, Amd gets better fps than gtx980ti or titan x (!)

I wasn't talking performance of the GPUs themselves but of proprietary technologies. This thing has NOTHING to do with how cards perform themselves.

---------- Updated at 11:35 AM ----------

calling TressFx better is a joke, it had the same performance problems as Hairwork ( tomb raider is the only game that used it unless am missing something ), and of course it look nicer on one single longer haired female character than an old ass Witcher with shorter hair and his horse ... and some monsters around... at the same time ... in an open world

It IS better because it doesn't bog down the other side arbitrarily, while doing the same exact thing. It doesn't matter if the technology is not more advanced, AMD is not actively blocking Nvidia to optimize their drivers for it, nor it asks devs to not collaborate with Nvidia to help them on optimizing their hardware for the technology. Actually, as I said above, AMD actively helped Nvidia directly on optmizing their drivers for the TressFX code.

So yes, it is better, because it is not tied to unfair competition and it doesn't bog down FPS as Hairworks does.

but you wanna be blind so whatever, both tressfx and hairwork looks like spaghetti for me and its gonna take some years before we can get nice implementations like they are showcased in demos , what worry me more is better/looking tech like CDPR had in the 35mn demo for example that was heavily toned down in favor of hairworks, that look average at best in its implementation and is a resources hog

You are missing completely the point here. I care nothing how those technologies look in themselves, I was replying to what you were saying about the approach of Nvidia to this issue. Nvidia has no rights whatsoever to block AMD from optmizing their drivers code for Nvidia own technologies. They have the right to own those technologies and the full propriety of them (so that AMD cannot use those same technologies in their hardware as to take advantage of them) but it certainly cannot block the other side and devs of games to have AMD optimize their drivers so that their hardware can work with those technologies (as it is now, given the approach of Nvidia on the issue, what AMD cards do is to simply have the GPU - or even worse the CPU, depending on the effect - take all the workload to process those effects, with no optimization in the drivers for calls and such; practically the drivers simply don't work with those technologies). And this independently from previous accords on the matter that are even existent in this case (hence making the thing even worse).

It never happened before in the history of GPUs and it is a very bad introduced precedent that, if taken as the norm, would spell the complete end of user freedom on the GPU market as you would be practically forced to play a game only if you own the right GPU branch for which the game was made to work with, If this approach becomes the norm and reaches its full conclusion this is what the game industry will become. So, in the end, AMD will be practically forced to close as they cannot compete with Nvidia as far as exclusives go and this will have nothing to do with hardware performance on one part or the other.

AMD could make some efforts instead of playing the victim and call gamers at their defense , and unless you prove wrong, even without gameworks AMD cards are still below Nvidia in term of performance in general, even the fury x .. so whats the excuse here ? nvidia implemented some secret codes to cripple AMD cards, in games they dont own ?

That AMD is behind Nvidia for performance has nothing to do with this issue. Is it possible that you cannot understand this? The fact that AMD is behind in performance is by itself already a punishemnt because users are preferring Nvidia over AMD for this motive. There's no need whatsoever to artificially cripple performance of the other part with unfair approach to technologies optimizations in drivers.

Moreover, I repeat, users and tech journals are in rage on the issue because it sets a very bad precedent that, if brought to its extremes (as it will do if left unchallenged) would mean the end of the freedom of choice from users in regard to which hardware to buy.

 

[XSon]

I thought this thread was about tweaks nor AMD vs Nvidia, and, really, who cares right now if Nvidia it's better than AMD. Let's talk about The Witcher 3, about tweaks and so on.

 

[Funchal99]

Hi, I'm new here and I just bought the game, downloading now.
I have a little question: this thread says v-sync should be turned off for better performance (and God knows I need it, since I got a laptop with 670MX), but does that mean I'd have to force v-sync through Nvdia control panel? Because it would be extremely annoying to play it with screen tearing.