Massive technical issues with TW2

[80maxwell08]

Massive technical issues with TW2

Ok by massive I mean I have a ton of issues rather than one single obscene issue (though some of these are absolutely game breaking for me). Well to start off my list my 360 gamepad doesn't work at all. The only buttons that work are the joysticks, the start & select button, the R1&L1 buttons and the b button. Everything else doesn't work at all. Which means I can't even get past the first part of the tutorial with the gamepad. This isn't gamebreaking since I obviously have a keyboard and mouse but here's where all of the other issues are.

There's a huge delay and unresponsiveness to everything. I have to hit keys several times to get anything to happen at all. I was going to start the game on easy to compensate for this but the graphical and framerate issues would make that a miserable experience.

For ubersampling if it's on the framerate is very jumpy going from 40s to single digits in just the tutorial. Also for some reason when I was talking to someone and it showed Geralt the frame rate just died to those single digit numbers but it was never that low any other time. Without ubersampling the framerate is playable but the normal anti aliasing doesn't work at all. Jagged edges are everywhere all the time. Also whether it is on or not there is flickering EVERYWHERE. In Geralt's hair, the floors, the grass, other people's hair, etc. It's almost sickening to play and I didn't even bother getting to the actual gameplay part when checking this part (I did get to the fighting in the tutorial before but I started the actual game to check how bad the flickering was).

So what do I do here. Is there just something wrong with my computer at this point? Here are my specs.
Intel i7 2600k (not overclocked)
Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus CPU cooler
2 EVGA GTX 560 Ti cards in SLI (both have 1gb vram)(on 296.10 driver)
MSI P67A-GD65 motherboard
Corsair 850w PSU
Corsair XMS3 8gb(4gb x 2 sticks) 1600MHz RAM
Seagate Barracuda 2tb 7200 RPM HDD.

Any advice is appreciated here. Please help. I bought this game twice and would have done it a 3rd time if they didn't give me the GOG copy just because I like that they aren't trying to stab you while taking your money. I would love to get through one of these games but I can't stand TW1's beginning and I can't play TW2 without the whole thing being ruined.

 

[Sirnaq]

first of all, never use ubersampling. Second aa ingame for some people is not enough so turn it off. Try downloading fxaa injector. unpack it in bin folder of the game.
http://witcher.nexusmods.com/mods/263
open FXAA_Tool.exe and turn of everything except fxaa. This should solve some of your issues and shadow jaggies.

 

[WrATH64]

SMAA injector is better if than FXAA because it doesn't blur the image. 300 series beta driver supports FXAA native now as well and you can use the NVIDIA Inspector to sharpen the FXAA blurriness by using negative LOD bias.

http://mrhaandi.blogspot.co.uk/p/injectsmaa.html

http://downloads.guru3d.com/NVIDIA-Inspector-1..9.6.5-download-2612.html

 

[80maxwell08]

Well thanks but that doesn't really fix anything. The ubersampling was only listed because the odd framerate issues. I know it's demanding but that would normally mean it stays low like 20s or something but mine jumps from very high to very low and don't get it.

 

[Licaon_Kter]

the game uses 1Gb of video RAM even without Uber, are you cards 2gb version? if not that's your answer, all the memory above 1Gb will be taken from system RAM

get MSIAfterburner and put the memory usage on OSD and tell us

 

[80maxwell08]

Both cards have 1gb of video ram. Guess I'll edit that into my original post as well.

 

[GuyNwah]

I wonder if this is a memory bandwidth bottleneck (especially at the PCI-e bus or the interfaces to the cards). This game does a lot of shipping resources to the video card. SLI doubles the volume of data that have to be moved. This can cause delays, especially when the data have to come from disk, and artifacts like texture pop-ins.

 

[Licaon_Kter]

the game uses ~1Gb of vRAM on my measely GTX460 on HIGH without some DoF/blur things

keep in mind that in SLI/Crossfire the memory does not add up, the same data set is copied on both cards

the bandwidth bottleneck occurs on 4xPCIEx maybe, but not on 16x or 8x

 

[Mblackwell1024]

Vsync is disabled, correct?

(in fact you should post your settings... and it's safe to assume this is with the EE, correct?)

 

[80maxwell08]

Everything's turned to max right now (except ubersampling is off). Also yes this is using EE. Granted I couldn't actually update it past 2.0 when using a physical copy but then GOG gave me the backup that was at EE already so I used that.
Texture Downscaling: none
Texture Memory Size: very large
Shadow Quality: Ultra
Number of Shadowed Lights: Ultra
LOD Distance: Far
Bloom: Enabled
Light Shafts: Enabled
Anti-Aliasing: Enabled
Blur Effects: Enabled
Depth of Field-Gameplay: Enabled
Vignette: Enabled
Wet Surface Rain Effect: Enabled
SSAO: Enabled
Motion Blur: Enabled
Cinematic Depth of Field: Enabled
Depth of Field Cutscenes: Enabled
Dangling Object Limit: Enabled
UberSampling: Disabled
Vertical Sync: Enabled
Decals: High Spec
Resolution 1920 x 1080
These aren't the recommended settings but I just tried and nothing was fixed. Also using those it looked awful and I could literally see the pixels in the shadows and the pop in was absolutely horrible. Along with texture pop in which wasn't there before. Which is absolutely odd since the settings were turned down. I figure that would be something more apparently with settings turned up. Grief I just got this computer a year ago and I might need to upgrade already.
EDIT: Huh also after reading that if I got more ram would that help anything? there's room for 2 more sticks and I've seen some 4gb sticks getting pretty cheap recently.

 

[GuyNwah]

the game uses ~1Gb of vRAM on my measely GTX460 on HIGH without some DoF/blur things

keep in mind that in SLI/Crossfire the memory does not add up, the same data set is copied on both cards

the bandwidth bottleneck occurs on 4xPCIEx maybe, but not on 16x or 8x

It's the same data set, but it still gets loaded to both cards. You'd need PCI-e multicast to avoid loading data twice. Even so, the OP's motherboard does x8/x8 when both slots are populated, so memory bandwidth is not going to be a problem.

But I'm still wondering whether disk is being read when the frame rate drops like that.

Cinematic Depth of Field: Enabled

Also, be sure to try disabling Cinematic DOF. With the EE, it is a framerate killer even in high-end setups.

 

[80maxwell08]

Well the only framerate problems I have are when ubersampling on but it's just an odd one. If that's normal I can get that but I don't know if my specific problems are. Not to mention there's the other problems aside from that.

 

[WrATH64]

Nothing you can do about the LOD popup issues, it's been there since day one and probably an engine feature or just badly optimised, threaded.

 

[80maxwell08]

Well the popup isn't there on the settings I listed just on what the recommended settings are.

 

[WrATH64]

Nothing wrong with your PC specs. I wish people would stop recommending upgrading just because devs don't optimise the game properly.

 

[Mblackwell1024]

Try this as a start -

High Preset:

Texture Downscaling: None
Texture Memory Size: Large
Shadow Quality: High
Number of Shadowed Lights: High
LOD Distance: Near
Bloom: Enabled
Light Shafts: Enabled
Anti-aliasing: Enabled
Blur Effects: Enabled
Depth of Field - Gameplay: Enabled
Vignette: Enabled
Wet Surfaces Rain Effect: Enabled
SSAO: Enabled
Motion Blur: Enabled
Cinematic Depth of Field: Disabled
Depth of Field - Cutscenes: Enabled
Dangling Objects Limit: Disabled
Ubersampling: Disabled
Vertical Sync: Disabled
Decals: High spec

Then try the exact same settings but starting with the Ultra preset (and leave Shadow number and Quality at Ultra in that case), assuming the results are good.

With the above settings btw I get perfectly playable (and generally consistent) framerates without weird graphical anamolies with lower spec hardware than you at the same resolution. That is, a Q9550@3GHz, 4GB DDR2, and a GTX 460 768MB (OCed).

 

[80maxwell08]

Try this as a start -

High Preset:

Texture Downscaling: None
Texture Memory Size: Large
Shadow Quality: High
Number of Shadowed Lights: High
LOD Distance: Near
Bloom: Enabled
Light Shafts: Enabled
Anti-aliasing: Enabled
Blur Effects: Enabled
Depth of Field - Gameplay: Enabled
Vignette: Enabled
Wet Surfaces Rain Effect: Enabled
SSAO: Enabled
Motion Blur: Enabled
Cinematic Depth of Field: Disabled
Depth of Field - Cutscenes: Enabled
Dangling Objects Limit: Disabled
Ubersampling: Disabled
Vertical Sync: Disabled
Decals: High spec

Then try the exact same settings but starting with the Ultra preset (and leave Shadow number and Quality at Ultra in that case), assuming the results are good.

With the above settings btw I get perfectly playable (and generally consistent) framerates without weird graphical anamolies with lower spec hardware than you at the same resolution. That is, a Q9550@3GHz, 4GB DDR2, and a GTX 460 768MB (OCed).

Well I still have all the graphical problems (anti-aliasing still looks like absolute crap) but the control delays are gone now at least. Not ideal but it's a start. Thanks.

 

[WrATH64]

Yeah, don't use their AA, it's crap MLAA with sharpening effect. Use SMAA injector. MSAA doesn't work because they use deferred shading so only shader based AA methods work in DX9.

300 series driver supports FXAA but it's blurry, probably some minus LOD bias would help that.

 

[80maxwell08]

Well how do I use SMAA? Also I don't use the 300 series of drivers. I'm on 291.60 right now. Have to edit that into my post too.

 

[WrATH64]

Download InjectSMAA v1.2 from here http://mrhaandi.blogspot.co.uk/p/injectsmaa.html Copy all the files in the dx9 folder to where your witcher2.exe is \The Witcher 2\bin

Disable an AA setting for The Witcher 2. SMAA will just work.