Update your drivers!

[Vattier]

When playing The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt on PC, please make sure to install and use the newest available drivers for your graphics card and system (this includes motherboard chipset drivers).

https://support.cdprojektred.com/en/witcher-3/pc/sp-technical/issue/2345/update-gpu-drivers

 

[tfhpsychokiller]

So, are the drivers causing neither GPU, nor CPU being used? How is this game using 80% or lower of my GPU at 4k and RT, while using less than 20% CPU?

Must be the drivers...

 

[mida2015]

My Specs:
i912900K
32GB DDR4 RAM
RTX 4090
Samsung 980 Pro NVMe

Thanks for nothing.

I use the latest GPU and Chipset Driver anyway, also Windows 11 is up to date (21H2).
Unfortunately Witcher 3 (Next-Gen Update) freeze and chrash a little bit too often.
The DX12 implementation is completely broken and the game is simply unplayable now.
Now I understand, why CP77 has no DLSS3/Frame Generation update.

 

[John_Russell]

So, are the drivers causing neither GPU, nor CPU being used? How is this game using 80% or lower of my GPU at 4k and RT, while using less than 20% CPU?

Must be the drivers...

The latest drivers will help mostly with crashing issues. The issue you are having is a problem with the DX12 implementation in the game engine itself. While you only show 20% usage if you monitor all cores/threads you will see that one or two threads are maxing out at 100% while the rest are hardly being used. The number you are seeing is the average of all cores/threads

For instance I have an 8 core 16 thread processor and see one or two threads banging off 100% while the rest are around 15% .... So if you do the math if you have 2 threads at 100% and the remaining 14 at 15% then the average is 25% but I am in fact CPU bound. Since the main game threads are maxing out at 100% then it limits the number of frames that can be sent to the GPU so you see low GPU utilization, lower framerates and often stuttering issues. Enabling Ray Tracing exacerbates the problem because it puts even more load on the CPU

 

[Wrapped-in-bacon]

1. The "contact us" button isn't available under PC and Witcher 3 on your support page for any performance issues.
2. I did try to "contact" under another topic on the site and the site would not accept my dxdiag.txt so I removed the file and then it still wouldn't accept the text file.
3. I am already on the latest driver and still continually have issues where running the game with RT on simply causes the game to crash frequently and run at a massive performance hit. RT on: 40-60 FPS, RT off: 120+ FPS. All other settings are set to High. I would think that my GPU and CPU are more than capable of running this, if it were optimized properly.

I am running an AMD 5950X CPU, 32 GB ddr4 3600Mhz RAM, EVGA RTX 3090 FTW3 Hybrid GPU, X570 Aorus Master Motherboard on firmware f36 and a 3440x1440 LG monitor at 120hz refresh.

 

[kratochvil1989]

When playing The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt on PC, please make sure to install and use the newest available drivers for your graphics card and system (this includes motherboard chipset drivers).

https://support.cdprojektred.com/en/witcher-3/pc/sp-technical/issue/2345/update-gpu-drivers

I did the problem is still DX12 , inst there any future plan to add Vulkan support to The Witcher 3, to be honnest the cpu utilization is just horendous. with Vulkan api i have much better expyrience especialy in older titles as witcher 3. Crysis remaster is using Vulkan for RT rendering while the Remaster itself isnt very well optimized title its still runs much more smoother on my AMD 7900xtx ,then updated Witcher. I know it can be also realy not yet optimal amd drivers , however GPU drivers will not solve CPU issues which comes with DX 12 in Witcher 3 even without RT performance impact is just horrible.

 

[R4zen_Hose_Tony]

There is Memory leak issue and is related to pobably broken Anisotropic Filtering builded in game engine and mem. leak active when your GPU VRAM is loaded over 95%. But on Nvidia GPU can be fixed just by change Anisotropic Filtering ( on x2 for performance + in game Sharpen on High, but for best textures quality go in x8 or x16) in Nvidia Control Panel for game witcher3.exe

Sadly for AMD this dosn't work, because in AMD Control Panel this option works only for DX9 games....

For best Performance use this settings:
Grass Density - go to High, looks much better then low or even medium, higher then this dosn't changes much.
Foilage Visability - same High or even Medium is enough, no big defrence even when set to Ultra+
Shadow - to High same situation
Backgraunds Characters - With slower CPU is recommend lowering to High or Medium better choice, with faster CPU (with minumum 6 cores or more) set Ultra or Ultra+.
Hairworks Off
DLSS on Quality for 1080p, Performance or Balanced for 1440p or higher res. (by analogy FSR2 same settings for non RTX cards)
the rest settings can be on Ultra/Ultra+

And the last, Optimized RT mod is must have to install:

Optimized Raytracing

Optimized Raytracing for lower RTGI performance cost with higher visual quality (increased coverage distance and lower GI lag)

www.nexusmods.com

can give form 15 to 20% more FPS over the RT performance 4.01 patch setting.

This is gameplay when I used RT with all thoes settings on much slower mobile RTX 3060 GPU, FPS in Novigrad ~30-45, out of town ~35-60:

Only now i can say it's looks good and smooth.

 

[Katzini]

still cannot launch the game, also not GOG platform, it shows error 0xc0150002, for witcher 3 installed from DVD.