Witcher 3 Graphics... are good once you fix them.
My graphics card arrived from being repaired today so have finally spent some time on w3!!
First things first.. its absolutely compulsory to use a sweetfx preset with this game. What you get out of the box is so much so 'wow gayness'. Its frikkin elwynn forest. Sweetfx fixes these great..
I'm using this one: https://sfx.thelazy.net/games/preset/3696/ (really click this to see the screenshots..) There's more choices if you click the breadcrumb on that page.
The first time you get 'disappointed' with the graphics must be the point after the intro flashback where you get to the water... i was thinking all sorts of upsetting things.. stupid watercolor painting... yuck... frikkin wow... Its really not good and needs sweetfx.
My opinion on the foliage? Well so far.. the environment design itself is damn flawless.. the position of each tree/shrub/rock/thing is damn perfect. Its just what sprouts out of the ground that a little messy. Given how bad they are.. well what helps is you must run at the native resolution of your monitor.. typically this doesn't doesn't get noticed, but given how they are what they are... this little bit of clarity seems to help.
Last I think all the stuff about nvidia non maxwell cards is a bit stupid.. yes fps is low.. but my gpu usage is at 99% always... and does whats on screen look like it would actually use that much gpu power? Yes definitely.
The standard things you do when unhappy with your framerate in the nvidia world.. guess what, they make a huge difference here too.. in the nvidia control panel force triple buffering, and set max prerendered frames to either 2 or 3.. It does make a noticable difference to smoothness. I'm running at 2560x1600, no gameworks features, everything ultra except foliage distance..
Anyways, good luck. One needs to fix the graphics in witcher 3.. see the above link for what mine is currently running like. Its night and day
EDIT: I haven't had as much fun PCMR fun since, well getting the 780ti. Some further data that might help people make the most out of it:
- Sharpening is a super important setting to have enabled. It really clears up the foliage mud quite a bit. The one in the game is okay, but if you're using sweetfx.. enabling lumasharpen in the config gets amazing results. It makes what you get get pretty damn close to "next gen". If you look at doctor's screenshots especially of the town.. seems that most of the awesome comes from that setting. Unfortunately its noticably expensive.. you definitely feel the hit.
- Overclocking GPU memory seems to make a huge difference, at least for my card more than the core.
I've spent some quality time going through all the post processing and graphics settings, most of the post process you can turn off, i'm only running blur, antialiasing (im guessing this is fxaa, and seems to smooth the fps out), bloom, HBAO+ (its definitely nicer than SSAO), and light shafts. Rest are off.
Out of the graphics settings i have shadows set to high (couldn't tell the difference between ultra) and foliage distance set to high.. I tried this on medium as well since lowing this gave back relatively alot of fps.. but when bolting around its a little bit too noticable on medium. I'm not sure if you would notice once you've finished benchmarking and are playing proper tho.. good chance not. Rest is on ultra.
Fun!
My graphics card arrived from being repaired today so have finally spent some time on w3!!
First things first.. its absolutely compulsory to use a sweetfx preset with this game. What you get out of the box is so much so 'wow gayness'. Its frikkin elwynn forest. Sweetfx fixes these great..
I'm using this one: https://sfx.thelazy.net/games/preset/3696/ (really click this to see the screenshots..) There's more choices if you click the breadcrumb on that page.
The first time you get 'disappointed' with the graphics must be the point after the intro flashback where you get to the water... i was thinking all sorts of upsetting things.. stupid watercolor painting... yuck... frikkin wow... Its really not good and needs sweetfx.
My opinion on the foliage? Well so far.. the environment design itself is damn flawless.. the position of each tree/shrub/rock/thing is damn perfect. Its just what sprouts out of the ground that a little messy. Given how bad they are.. well what helps is you must run at the native resolution of your monitor.. typically this doesn't doesn't get noticed, but given how they are what they are... this little bit of clarity seems to help.
Last I think all the stuff about nvidia non maxwell cards is a bit stupid.. yes fps is low.. but my gpu usage is at 99% always... and does whats on screen look like it would actually use that much gpu power? Yes definitely.
The standard things you do when unhappy with your framerate in the nvidia world.. guess what, they make a huge difference here too.. in the nvidia control panel force triple buffering, and set max prerendered frames to either 2 or 3.. It does make a noticable difference to smoothness. I'm running at 2560x1600, no gameworks features, everything ultra except foliage distance..
Anyways, good luck. One needs to fix the graphics in witcher 3.. see the above link for what mine is currently running like. Its night and day
EDIT: I haven't had as much fun PCMR fun since, well getting the 780ti. Some further data that might help people make the most out of it:
- Sharpening is a super important setting to have enabled. It really clears up the foliage mud quite a bit. The one in the game is okay, but if you're using sweetfx.. enabling lumasharpen in the config gets amazing results. It makes what you get get pretty damn close to "next gen". If you look at doctor's screenshots especially of the town.. seems that most of the awesome comes from that setting. Unfortunately its noticably expensive.. you definitely feel the hit.
- Overclocking GPU memory seems to make a huge difference, at least for my card more than the core.
I've spent some quality time going through all the post processing and graphics settings, most of the post process you can turn off, i'm only running blur, antialiasing (im guessing this is fxaa, and seems to smooth the fps out), bloom, HBAO+ (its definitely nicer than SSAO), and light shafts. Rest are off.
Out of the graphics settings i have shadows set to high (couldn't tell the difference between ultra) and foliage distance set to high.. I tried this on medium as well since lowing this gave back relatively alot of fps.. but when bolting around its a little bit too noticable on medium. I'm not sure if you would notice once you've finished benchmarking and are playing proper tho.. good chance not. Rest is on ultra.
Fun!
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