Sorry for the off topic but could you give a bit more info on this? PM me if you need to.
The name of the mod/fix was TESV Acceleration Layer.
TESVAL is an in-memory code patch for TESV, aiming to fix a few of the worst CPU hogs.
Description:
This patch will improve your frame rate by up to 40% in all CPU-dependent situations, i.e. especially in cities.
It works mostly by rewriting some x87 FPU code and inlining a whole ton of useless getter functions along the critical paths because the developers at Bethesda, for some reason, compiled the game without using any of the optimization flags for release builds.
Today you don't need this cause it's already implemented. But thanks to other people, not Bethesda.
This fix has improved my performance by 20 frames in some cases! Of course this was nothing new to me because i have already knew that the game should perform much better.
But 20 frames!?
People spend small fortune buying faster cards just to increase their fps by 10 frames. Sometimes even less.
I understand you guys expect games to "scale" relatively well on different hardware, and what you expect is games like TW3 to be playable with an affordable minimum system requirements. If I am not mistaken, TW2 actually ran decently with most eye candy off in the suggested platform (8800 GT, 2 GB RAM, etc.). Of course by decent I mean barely playable: ~30 FPS, "lower" resolution like 1366x768, etc. If you consider we're talking about hardware from 2007/2008 running a compute-intensive game from 2011 this is actually impressive.
"Optimization" is thrown around way too often. To optimize a computer program in terms of performance means achieving a satisfiable balance between results and response times. In other words, you want the game to show off as much as possible while being as responsive as possible. The Witcher 2 uses a very impressive graphical engine and I believe CDPR achieved a good compromise. As I said, it ran on three-year-old hardware at the time of release. If you say TW2 wasn't "optimized" you'd have to provide data showing either: 1) there is a way to improve game elements such as graphics while keeping the same acceptable performance and/or 2) you can improve performance while keeping the game elements (eg. graphics) intact. In computing terms, program scalability involves finding an equation relating input size and resources with respect to efficiency. For instance, if you can increase both your data and your resources by some unknown ratio (say, square the data and double the resources) and maintain your efficiency then your program is scalable. The thing here is we don't know enough of this about The Witcher 2 or any other game for that matter to simply say "it's unoptimized". You don't know if it could perform better simply because it doesn't run too well on your hardware.
I am confident CDPR will work as best as they can and I am sure moderate machines will be able to play TW3, but with most visual effects turned off. This is what happens with demanding games and we all know it. If you want to have a high-range gaming PC that will play all games fluidly, be prepared to upgrade every 4 or so years. Nobody said it was a cheap hobby.
I do agree that many games seem like they could perform better. They don't seem to use all available resources (but we don't know if they could use them efficiently) and sometimes they are not even impressive compared to their insane requirements. But I don't know what goes on inside and I can only assume maybe it could run faster. Someone pointed out some person made Skyrim run faster, and that is a good proof.
Actually i don't expect TW3 to scale relatively well on different hardware. This is why i would like to have opportunity to tweak some things. Menu graphic options don't offer in depth tweaking.
Problem with TW2 was that even if i disable many of the effects - framerate stays practically the same. That's not good.
One of the worst examples of bad optimization is Assassin's Creed 4. This picture tells everything. Everything is on low and i have only 36 frames? With my rig i should have between 55-60 frames here.
Todays developer philosophy is - by better hardware if you want to play our unoptimized game. But dude, your game graphics is nothing special.
There is an old W3 pic from 2013 that shows Grealt in the day time walking into some village, with an npc feeding some hens in front of him. It looks real awesome, I wish someone could post it here if you have not seen it yet. It's one of my favorite W3 pics so far, the world looks so alive and real