The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - PC System Requirements are here!

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How will a workstation handle Wild Hunt?

I don't have a gaming machine anymore, will my workstation handle Witcher 3? The processors are only 3.1GHz., but everything else meets or exceeds the requirements.

Dual Intel Xeon CPU 8 Core E5-2687W 3.1GHz
Nvidia Quadro K5000 (4GB GDDR5)
RAM - 64GB DDR3 1600
OS - Windows 7 Pro 64-bit

Thanks,
Greg
 
Well as far as gaming goes, the 4690 is an excellent CPU. I think for the time being it will be more than enough since Hyper Threading which the i7's have don't really add anything significant for gaming. Maybe 2-3fps from what i've seen and researched. Take a look at the video i will post below, which is quite comprehensive, to see the differences.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVl8Eupbr_E

Let me disagree. If a game is programmed to take advantage of HT and the game is CPU heavy it will give around 20% performance, which is a lot.
In this video the i7 4790k clocked on 4,5 is shown with HT on and HT off in AC UNITY. You can clearly see that the GPU is getting bottlenecked by the CPU after HT is turned OFF. In this case it means 10-15 FPS loss and 10% gpu bottleneck.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKzJE0Z-XFk
 
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Does tw3 support dolby digital live, dts interactive or both? Damn you realtek for making us use hacks to get these!!!! :/
 
If a game is programmed to take advantage of HT and the game is CPU heavy it will give around 20% performance

My apologies for only quoting only this part of your post but i think this is what counts. "If" a game is programmed for it, then an i7 will have the advantage.

Almost all of the games of late 2014/early 2015, there is literaly no evidence of this. All games run just as well on 4 cores and 4 cores with HT so i doubt that the witcher 3 will change that. The differences are minimal and around 1-2fps most of the times.

Also, as @il_corleone_manu posted, AC Unity is a technical mess and really not fit to be taken into consideration when it comes to benchmarks for performance.

I think an i5-4690 will play the game just as well as a i7-4790 with only slight differences.

Sorry for going "slightly" off topic.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcrW_B_jQUU I found that video
As you can see, we dont know if AC unity is Programmed or not for HT , maybe is a Bugfest or simply takes advantage of the HT because it`s poor optimization, but on other games, Crysis 3 for example, really CPU or GPU intesive is 3-4 fps at MOST, so, I trust in PROJECTKRED to really optimize their game like Crysis 3 (CPU Wise), with HT only giving you 3-4 fps, HT is not meant to play games, remember.
I didn`t knew anything of this 1 month before, just researching and Thanks to Giovanni I found all of this, and in ALL of example AC Unity is, emm, not comparable I would say.
 
Hey dudes Ac unity is not poorly optimized. it was at realease for sure, but after 5 patches it is very well optimized it runs like butter smooth.
crysis 3 is not a good example because it isn't a cpu heavy game.

AC unity is a good example in this comparison for a simple logical reasons:
It is clearly the most CPU intensive game out there, due to it's open world, and NPC count.

Another example could be GTA 5 where the i5 4690 bottlenecks the gtx 970 hardly. 95% cpu usage 70% gpu usage.
see for yourself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdMZp8m6wXM

Most of the 2014 /2015 games are optimized to take advantage of HT. I'm saying this based on my gaming experience, since i have a i7 4790 and all the modern games i've played are taking advantage of it and they are using all 8 threads. There are some exceptions( for example dying light used only 1 core at release, but it got fixed after a few updates.)
 
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Hey dudes Ac unity is not poorly optimized. it was at realease for sure, but after 5 patches it is very well optimized it runs like butter smooth.
crysis 3 is not a good example because it isn't a cpu heavy game.

AC unity is a good example in this comparison for a simple logical reasons:
It is clearly the most CPU intensive game out there, due to it's open world, and NPC count.

Another example could be GTA 5 where the i5 4690 bottlenecks the gtx 970 hardly. 95% cpu usage 70% gpu usage.
see for yourself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdMZp8m6wXM

Most of the 2014 /2015 games are optimized to take advantage of HT. I'm saying this based on my gaming experience, since i have a i7 4790 and all the modern games i've played are taking advantage of it and they are using all 8 threads. There are some exceptions( for example dying light used only 1 core at release, but it got fixed after a few updates.)

Sorry, I do not agree with you, AC unity is the most Intensive CPU game because of it,s bad optimization, not because it is something from other world, I have 2 friends, both on the Video-Editing/Photoshop, they have a I7 2600k and a i7 3770k, The difference against the both is barely noticiable on games, 1- 2 fps, and in some games, with my i5 2500 I got 1-2 fps less than them, One exmample was GTA V with my gtx 760, one of the, the 2600k had the same Gpu as me, Whitout mfaa both of us we had a difference of 3 fps at most.

Looks from the video that the CPU can`t do more, but look at the FPS, 100+ at some cases and looks steady 70, I do not care if my i5 2500 bottlenecks and it give me 80 fps and no 90/100, everything is ok for me above 35/40 fps, also it`s a brand new gpu, it is meant for last, at least 2 years at ultra/high on 1080p of what I read, I plan to upgrade to a new CPU these crhistmas,

Other thing that I observed is that, the i7 beneficts (and newer tier of i5/i7) in CPU intensive games above the 85/100 mark, look at skyrim


as long as my i5 2500 can reach the 45fps window, I will be happy (I had tested Skyrim today, Free with steam) and I had 90 fps with the 970 as minimum, so if you have a very good GPU, you will stil be able to max out games without problem
 

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Most of the 2014 /2015 games are optimized to take advantage of HT.
No they're not nor is that's not how it works. You don't "optimize" or "support" HT, CPU does that on its own if a game needs more threads then it uses them and in 99% games the difference is minimal sometimes even degrading performance, only in a few it gives a decent bump at times.

Any difference in performance is simply because of stronger core clocks on the i7. Core and Threads are NOT the same thing. As for AC Unity, most CPU intensive? Tell that to all the strategy games out there.
 
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@sz0ty0l4

In the video you posted, what you claim is happening was visible on the first minutes of the vid. In the second half i could see CPU at 75-90% and GPU at around 95-100% which is totally fine.

Not to mention that he had all the extra fluff settings enabled, which are turned off by default because are for high end systems. High end means GTX 980 and above. Those settings are Long Shadows, High Resolution Shadows, High Detail Streaming While Flying, Extended Distance Scaling and Extended Shadows Distance. Those are to GTA V what ubersampling was to The witcher 2, when it comes to system resources. Turning those off, you won't see a difference and the game won't have any kind of problems. An i5 bottlenecking a GTX 970 is almost impossible.

I have tested this on a friends PC. Turning these options on have almost zero improvement but the CPU and GPU usage goes sky high.

As Sid said above, AC:U is nowhere near as taxing on the CPU as Total War: Attila or Cities Skylines and those games have literaly zero difference between 4 cores and 4 cores with HT.

When it comes to The Witcher 3, although we have no hard evidence as of yet, i am almost positive that an i5 of 3rd or 4th generation will run the game perfectly.
 
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Sorry, I do not agree with you, AC unity is the most Intensive CPU game because of it,s bad optimization, not because it is something from other world

AC Unity isn't poorly optimized. It's CPU intensive due to the high amount of density and detail in the game world. There are thousands of NPCs, all casting shadows and many with cloth simulation effects. Also, many of the buildings are unique structures.. All of this requires a lot of processing power.

Also, AC Unity scales all the way to 6 threads. I have AC Unity installed on my system right now (4930K @ 4.5ghz and GTX 980 SLI) and I'm getting constant 60 FPS with maxed settings (FXAA) at 1440p..



---------- Updated at 06:22 PM ----------

As Sid said above, AC:U is nowhere near as taxing on the CPU as Total War: Attila or Cities Skylines and those games have literaly zero difference between 4 cores and 4 cores with HT.

I would disagree. AC Unity is more CPU intensive because it scales across 6 threads. Attila and other strategy games usually use no more than four threads on the other hand, with the lead thread getting hammered:

 
An i5 bottlenecking a GTX 970 is almost impossible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWWU9UjLLCc
just happend in gta 5..

No they're not nor is that's not how it works. You don't "optimize" or "support" HT, CPU does that on its own if a game needs more threads then it uses them and in 99% games the difference is minimal sometimes even degrading performance, only in a few it gives a decent bump at times.

Any difference in performance is simply because of stronger core clocks on the i7. Core and Threads are NOT the same thing. As for AC Unity, most CPU intensive? Tell that to all the strategy games out there.
I've already linked a clear evidence of HT improving performance by around 15% in AC U. What you can see in that video is the same i7 processor clocked on 4,5ghz once with HT on and once with HT off the difference is 15% in performance and a 10% gpu bottleneck.

The operating system and the motherboard has to support hyper threading as i know.
Programs need to be optimized for Ht in the meaning of beeing able to scale well on multiplie logical processors if the OS can provide these logical processor to the program. So yes if a program is written to take advantage of using 16 logical processor, then the actual program will benefit from it in performance.
Why you think intel is makeing 10core(20thread) xeon processor? For example heavy data storage programs are written to use the performance advantage of 20 threads or even multiplie 10core xeons . Same thing goes for games, just the numbers are different.

I bet Witcher 3 will also take advantage of using multiplie threads and i promise you when the game comes out i will record a benchmark video with shadowplay on my system( i7 4790 gtx 980 16gb ram 850 evo z97) with hyperthreading on and off in witcher 3 with monitoring program on screen display. To be honest I'm already excited to do it and can't wait.
Anyway the most accurate would be to ask the engine programming team about the topic.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBy_NIYvjU0 in this one, the 4460 is paired with a 660( is not a 970, yes), bu the cpu is not near 100%, I do not think those benchamrks are accurate, we should find one "better".

I dont`k now if W3 will beneficth from HT, but it will come better optimized with HT or not than most of the games

Yes in this video the gpu is not bottlenecked by the cpu. But if you'd take out the 660 and put in a 970 instead you'd be bottlenecked by that moment(using settings for 970 not 660 ofc). It works somewhat like this: The cpu is the base of the system. it sends the data for use to the gpu. the dataflow goes from the drive through ram to vram and ofc caches. The gpu uses the data coming from the cpu ,it produces and sends the frames to the display.

When the cpu is not powerfull enough to push the required data to the gpu, the gpu will have to wait. this happens with the 970 and i5 in gta 5. you can see the cpu is working on its maximum , 90%+ on all 4 cores and the gpu has to wait( 60% ). I think in games like GTA 5, or and AC U actually the "moving " of the world is running on the cpu. That could be the most logic reason for the huge cpu activity and you can clearly see for yourself, the cpu activity rises when you get into a high density area and it decreases when the density is less.

My guess would be similar solution in witcher3, because it's an open world game with high density, but im unsure about this.

Anyway my only point with saying all this is to help people decide when it comes to the performance/price difference between i5 and i7, because i was building my system a few month ago, and i decided to get the i7 and it was totally worth the money. I can clearly see the benefit of it when it comes to multitasking and game performance.
 
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The CPU does not "push" data to the GPU. That's PIO, and it's been dead for years.

The CPU initiates memory transfers to the GPU; these transfers execute and complete without the CPU needing to execute any instructions. Then it fields an interrupt indicating the transfer has completed. If there are many resources to be transferred, it is still a significant burden.

What happens with HT, though, is each core has two thread contexts and a scheduler that can interleave instructions from both. So a core can be computing while also waiting for an event. This is a huge win for programs that are designed well enough to take advantage of it.

Historically, games have been stuck with a thread that spends its time queuing GPU commands and a thread that executes Lua scripts, and these threads constitute the bottleneck. Older DirectX versions can't do any better, and Lua has no ability to multithread.

I'm glad this is changing to where some games are well enough threaded that they can take advantage of HT.
 
I don't like going off topic so this will be my last post on this thing apart from helping people as much as possible with TW3.

AC:Unity, running on an i5-3570K with a GTX 970 with all the bells and whistles on, even MSAA x4. Check it out and see how the CPU is almost always 85-95% and the GPU is easily at 95-100%. See there are a lot of tests out there

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PW3GdR4Gnzc
 
So I will wait for the game releases to see bencharmks, I am now planing on this

i7 4790(non K)
Gigabyte H97M MOBO
and a new Tower+Fan = 530$

i5 4690
B85 MOBO
New Tower+ Fan
= 400$

130$ difference, will the performance be noticiable? we will know on it`s launch but I am confident my actual i5 2500 will push to high/maxed 40 fps with 970 and 12 Gb Ram , what we are doing here is speculate, PROJECTRED , and for this I am sure, will Optimizate his game for 110% or at least with the patches, so we should wait and see

end of OFFTOPIC for me
 
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