NPC pop-in issues

[SigilFey]

Double Check user.setting / ini Files:
Game Installed Directory\The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt\bin\config\base\rendering.ini
C:\Users(usernamehere)\Documents\The Witcher 3\user.settings
Find "TextureMipBias" and change it to "TextureMipBias=0" (If it's not already 0)


This is a silly tweak. Basically, it'll mean your GPU is going to try to draw the veins of an NPC's eyes while they're 50 feet away. (Provided they're not waiting to pop in at 3 feet away. )

Plus, it totally defeats the purpose of "mip-mapping", which dynamically draws more precise texture details only when they're close enough to be seen...saving enormous amounts of processing power...

 

[xandre434]

Double Check user.setting / ini Files:
Game Installed Directory\The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt\bin\config\base\rendering.ini
C:\Users(usernamehere)\Documents\The Witcher 3\user.settings
Find "TextureMipBias" and change it to "TextureMipBias=0" (If it's not already 0)


This is a silly tweak. Basically, it'll mean your GPU is going to try to draw the veins of an NPC's eyes while they're 50 feet away. (Provided they're not waiting to pop in at 3 feet away. )

Plus, it totally defeats the purpose of "mip-mapping", which dynamically draws more precise texture details only when they're close enough to be seen...saving enormous amounts of processing power...

no, you have it backwards. setting TextureMipBias to 0 prevents the game from rendering higher details at further distances. the more negative the value, the more precise the detail. this used to be set to 0 automatically for low to ultra, but now -1 is linked to the ultra settings and 0 is linked to low (and i think medium).

of course, this has nothing to do with npc pop in the slightest.

 

[SigilFey]

no, you have it backwards. setting TextureMipBias to 0 prevents the game from rendering higher details at further distances. the more negative the value, the more precise the detail. of course, this has nothing to do with npc pop in the slightest.

Yes! You are correct! My bad. Brain-fart.

 

[Exentryk]

So, is there anything that can be done to reduce pop in? I have bucket loads of system ram, SSD and my GTX980 is only using 2gb of VRAM. Basically, I have resources but they're not getting fully used. Can I change anything to improve this? Also, the environment pop in is more obvious in Skellige for some reason.

The earlier patches were better. 1.03 or 1.04 onwards on PC just crapped it all. =/

 

[Black_Iris]

Would love to see a fix/solution to this problem.
GeForce Experience should not be required to fix this issue.
I first started seeing pop-in issues in 1.04 while horse racing and it has slowly become worse over time (either that or I'm just noticing it more).

i5 2600k @ 4.0GHz
GTX 670 4GB OC
8GB DDR3 RAM
HDD

Never had any issues in the inital version of the game.

Nvidia Experience DOES NOTHING to resolve the issue. The problem has nothing to do with settings in the game, it is an issue of the engine. If it was just a matter of dabbling with settings people would have resolved the problem from a lot of time already.

---------- Updated at 10:04 AM ----------

This has worked really well for me. It's most noticeable in Novigrad. When you are approaching an area you know to be crowded, they are all there whereas before these tweaks, it would be a ghost town until you were literally a few feet away.

Give it a try, and remember there are 2 identical files to tweak.

Sorry, but what you see is must probably coming from coincidence because the author himself stated that those changes do absolutely nothing to resolve the pop-in issue in the game.

People should understand that the issue doesn't happen in all circumstances. If, for example, you fast travel to an area then it doesn't happen as fast traveling loads ALL npcs immediately (this also mean, btw, that those users that use fast travel a lot will notice the problem much less, while the "purist" while notice it a lot). Same if you rest in an area. The only way to be sure to test supposed "fixes" of the issue is to save far away from an area the pop-in happens and then go there on horse or foot. That's the ONLY proper way to test if the problem is resolved, and I would personally try the supposed solution in different areas to be sure that's the case.

---------- Updated at 10:09 AM ----------

I was playing the game for little less than a week before I really noticed it. It had been there from the beginning, of course, but I was too busy drooling over the different types of bushes blowing in the breeze to notice it with complete consciousness. That's the way "visuals" usually work.

Not exactly. While it is true that the pop-in was indeed there from the beginning, the way it worked was different and it was not so noticeable. I tested personally the behavior of patch 1.02 to see if there was something different and there was. The pop-in happened, yes, but it very seldomnly happened in front of you as it does now. In the vast majority of circumstances it happened "behind your back", so to speak. If for example you walked in a place and the engine couldn't load NPCs in time it didn't load them immediately in front of you but it sort of "waited" for you to turn to then create the instances. This made actually a pretty good difference as in normal playing you would not notice the difference as you do now.

The pop-in was still there but it was not "on your face" as it is now. At the least if a problem is there it is better to hide it as much as possible and I don't understand why they instead opted to go for having everyone notice it even if they would not normally do (it's pretty impossible to not notice it now as it happens in front of your eyes).

 

[SigilFey]

Not exactly. While it is true that the pop-in was indeed there from the beginning, the way it worked was different and it was not so noticeable. I tested personally the behavior of patch 1.02 to see if there was something different and there was. The pop-in happened, yes, but it very seldomnly happened in front of you as it does now. In the vast majority of circumstances it happened "behind your back", so to speak. If for example you walked in a place and the engine couldn't load NPCs in time it didn't load them immediately in front of you but it sort of "waited" for you to turn to then create the instances. This made actually a pretty good difference as in normal playing you would not notice the difference as you do now.

The pop-in was still there but it was not "on your face" as it is now. At the least if a problem is there it is better to hide it as much as possible and I don't understand why they instead opted to go for having everyone notice it even if they would not normally do (it's pretty impossible to not notice it now as it happens in front of your eyes).

True enough. It's probably and adjustment to the streaming/threading system that didn't work out quite as well as the devs planned. It'll get sorted eventually. I also noticed that, before patch 1.04, it only seemed to happen if I changed direction quickly while walking around. So my guess is that it's a method of "unloading" characters while they're not on-screen to save RAM and processing cycles. This, I doubt, is a major issue for the devs. Probably more like a series of tweaks until they hit the sweet spot.

 

[Marilith01]

True enough. It's probably and adjustment to the streaming/threading system that didn't work out quite as well as the devs planned. It'll get sorted eventually. I also noticed that, before patch 1.04, it only seemed to happen if I changed direction quickly while walking around. So my guess is that it's a method of "unloading" characters while they're not on-screen to save RAM and processing cycles. This, I doubt, is a major issue for the devs. Probably more like a series of tweaks until they hit the sweet spot.

I can confirm this. I also posted it already in an older thread to this problem (cannot find the old thread anymore). On a Novigrad quest I left a house in Novigrad and saw the following scene: A wooden box, where usually a priest stands and preaches, 2 NPCs kneeling before the box - but no priest. Since it was daytime, I found this peculiar. So I turned around and walked a very short distance so that neither Geralt nor the camera looked at the scene. Turned around again and around 3 seconds later the scene was fully populated. The priest was standing on his box, and around 10 NPCs (including the 2 which were here before) listened.

This happened with 1.02, the release version, which I still use to play. (For me the most bug free and stable version!).

I had installed 1.03 for a short time, but it was more unstable, had no obvious advantages (what they did in 1.03 is a mystery, probably only patches for the consoles) and I started to see popins of NPCs, which I did not see before (see above).

So this confirms, that the popin problem was always here, but it occurred only if you did not look in this direction with 1.02. Starting with 1.03 people started to notice the problem. Its probably not a bug, just a peculiarity of the engine. If you meditate or fast travel, there is a fixed point (end of meditation or your arrival with fast travel) where the engine can slip in enough time to ensure the scene is fully populated. No such point exists in a well defined manner if you walk or ride towards a location, and then the problem happens.

 

[SigilFey]

I can confirm this. I also posted it already...

Heh. I think 1.03 was the beginning of the attempt to stabilize the game simultaneously across PC and consoles. To develop the magical panacea of code that would cure the ills of both worlds...

I think, I've come up with an idea for a new business venture. A studio that takes conceptual code from a AAA developer, and simultaneously but autonamously develops parallel code exclusively for PC. No connection whatsoever in the code -- no port, no shared devices, just pure code written from the ground up by a team specializing in PC coding. Alright...they can share art assets.

 

[The_Visitor]

This is really getting annoying. NPCs load right in front of me.
The pop-in issue should be one of the highest priority things to fix, cause it is really distracting, when an empty village is populated right in front of you.