Game suddenly unplayable with extreme lag

[Vincent_LeBlanc]

I have run the Witcher 3 at a smooth 30 FPS on medium/high settings for a month, then had to stop playing end of September. When I started it again yesterday, the game would start minimized and I couldn't maximize it. Turns out this was the fullscreen bug where you have to change to borderless window mode in the user.setting file. Okay, fixed that, although I don't understand why it would be a problem now when it wasn't 2 months ago.

But whatever, I load the game.

Loading takes much longer than before, and then the image starts appearing. Slooooowly. Like 2 FPS.

Don't tell me my system can't run it, it was running perfectly before. I am not overclocked, my screen is fixed at 60Hz, I tried rolling back Nvidia drivers to version 399, I have installed all Visual C++ runtimes I could find, even did the performance tweaks suggested in the stickied posts (though it is pointless because it ran fine with my previous settings). It worked fine on version 1.31a, but both 1.31a and 1.32 have the problem.

Here's a list of threads of people reporting the same issue without any clear fix in sight :
https://steamcommunity.com/app/292030/discussions/0/365163686063617736/
https://www.reddit.com/r/witcher/comments/76wutj https://forums.cdprojektred.com/index.php?threads/the-witcher-3-has-suddenly-begun-lagging.9626501/

Does anyone have a solution?

i7-4970HQ
GTX-860M
4GB DDR3 Ram at 1700MHz
Samsung EVO 840
Windows 10 x64 Fall Update

 

[devivre]

Any mods installed? That can also mess with the game.

Have you tried reinstalling the game?

Verify/Repair can be another option (you can do that with Steam and GOG).

Support can be reached here:
https://en.cdprojektred.com/contact-support/

 

[Vincent_LeBlanc]

Any mods installed? That can also mess with the game.

Have you tried reinstalling the game?

Verify/Repair can be another option (you can do that with Steam and GOG).

Support can be reached here:
https://en.cdprojektred.com/contact-support/

Thanks for your reply!

No, I have no mods installed. I have also used Verify/Repair in GOG.

I have tried rolling back the install to 1.31a then back to 1.32. Not sure if that would count as a reinstall (the download is 12GB...). Do you think it's worth a try?

I guess I'll do that while I wait for support to contact me.

 

[devivre]

Reinstalling might be worth a try, but hard to say.
Did you change anything on you computer, for example installed a program that might be interfering?

 

[Felix333]

Try a clean uninstall and reinstall

 

[Barmin21]

I was running Witcher 3 on my old I-920 with a ATI 5870 graphics card smoothly at medium settings. One day the framerate dropped to 3-4 FPS a real slideshow. The animation and load screen was normal, but when the gameplay started everything went into slow motion. I tried many solutions from the forums to no avail. I ran across using Selective Startup to isolate the problem. It turned out that a Service "ENTRYPROTECT by Sentrybay" was causing a conflict. It is used by AOL Shield Pro and other programs to prevent screen capture. After turning it off I had my game back to normal.

To turn it off go to the spyglass at the bottom left of the Windows screen and type sysconfig. On the tabbed screen go to the bottom and chose selective startup and uncheck use original boot config. Now go to the tabs at the top and select Services. on the Services tab click on hide all Microsoft Services at the bottom. Scroll until you see ENTRYPROTECT Service by Sentrybay and unselect and hit apply. It will ask you for a restart and restart your system.

I hope this helps.

 

[Hayashi.226]

Check that the game is using the GFX card rather than the onboard chip that comes with the motherboard. I experienced this too, when the game suddenly started using the chip instead of the card. Happened about once or twice.