The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

[RussianSensation]

Sounds like an excuse to explain AMD's poor driver support

I'm glad that MAD Studios called out AMD publically for their driver support which fully explains the poor performance of AMD GPUs in Project Cars. That and the lack of DX11 multithreading which Project Cars uses..

Curious to know what your explanation is for how 980 is 50% faster than 780Ti, how 960 OC is just 6% slower than 780Ti, how 770 scales perfectly against a 680 but 780Ti hardly scales against the 780, and how the Titan X hardly scales against a 980? Sounds like an amazingly optimized game engine! Not.....
http://www.computerbase.de/2015-05/project-cars-guide-grafikkarte-prozessor-vergleich/2/

Let's face it, in the current state, Project CARS is runs bad on everything besides Maxwell. Sure, AMD fell asleep at the wheel and didn't optimize their DX8.1 driver but there is a massive 40-50% increase in FPS in W10 vs. W8.1, which throws your entire theory about AMD's DX11 driver sucking out the window. If AMD's DX11 driver was so awful, switching from W8.1 to W10 would do nothing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzFe5OOHZko

Not to mention there is a major GPU under-utilization issue with AMD cards in Project CARS and performance goes up 20-30% from moving the PowerTune to +20% without doing anything else.

Hairworks, which runs well on AMD but slightly slower due to the fact that it uses isoline tessellation and other than Tonga, AMD's tessellation performance is not equal to NVidia's..

Where did you see benchmarks of Hairworks of NV vs. AMD for TW3? I don't think we can pass judgement yet.

However, in your statements, you never mentioned anything about NV's inferior and performance crippling implementation of PCSS in games.

"In regards to NVIDIA PCSS at times there is no shadow at all displayed in an area where AMD CHS or Rockstar's settings show a shadow. The shadows are also a lot more blurry in some cases, especially dealing with leaves projected onto objects." ~ HardOCP :hmm:

and the performance is worse too - a double whammy!

"Rockstar's Softest shadow option is the fastest, then AMD CHS and then NVIDIA PCSS as the slowest. The difference is a slightly larger 14% on the R9 290X between Rockstar's Softest setting and NVIDIA PCSS. The drop is also greater between Softest shadows and AMD CHS." ~ HardOCP

Hilarious, 14% performance drop from Rockstar's shadows despite having inferior IQ. GW FTW! :biggrin:

Anyways, back to TW3. Let's hope this isn't another AC Unity repeat in terms of over hyped visuals and terrible performance.

 

[futurefields]

i prefer Sharp shadows with High Resolution Shadows in the advanced options enabled

nvidia's pcss is the most true to life though

 

[RussianSensation]

Regarding Kepler performance, I still think the main reason why Kepler fell back was because its compute performance is significantly behind both the GCN Radeons and Maxwell and compute shaders are becoming more and more popular these days with devs..

Doesn't explain how 780Ti easily keeps up with a 970 in many vendor agnostic titles not under the GW's umbrella. Neither does it at all explain how in games like Project CARS a 1024 CUDA core 960 is just 6% within a 2880 CUDA core 780Ti.

It's interesting how Kepler performs well vs. Maxwell in games NV doesn't care to market much. Coincidence?

780Ti is as fast or faster than the 970, how it should be, but that's because NV had nothing to do with any of these titles. Ha!

 

[Carfax83]

This time he is 100% correct. Not to take away from TW3, as it's likely going to be an epic open world RPG, but from a technical perspective, it was 100% downgraded. Did you not see the awful fire effects completely lacking smoke?

Practically all of those screenshots you posted are moot, because those were taken on the preview builds which does not represent the final code.

As for downgrading, to be realistic we cannot expect CDPR to make the Witcher 3 with the kind of graphics seen in those tech trailers. Nobody would be able to run it except people with very high end systems..

PC gaming has never been about balls to the walls graphics. It's always been about customization and settings so you can tweak the game to your hardware.. But this has limits.

No more blood on water and ground, blood toned down heavily, combat feels light

A CDPR dev said that was a bug.

 

[RussianSensation]

Practically all of those screenshots you posted are moot, because those were taken on the preview builds which does not represent the final code.

How is it moot when the game looked far more realistic before? The recent trailer posted just 8 days before launch shows horrible fire effects, no smoke while all the videos we were shown before included spectacular fire and smoke effects. Did you watch those bonus videos where the current version of the game has no blood effects during combat? Why remove those, unless they were targeting the younger console gamers to make the game more appealing to a wider audience? There should be a gore setting, maybe

As for downgrading, to be realistic we cannot expect CDPR to make the Witcher 3 with the kind of graphics seen in those tech trailers.

You are saying it's OK to lie and show trailers of a PC game that we would never get? What was the point of that then? Also, some of those screenshots are from gameplay trailers.

Nobody would be able to run it except people with very high end systems..

PC gaming has never been about balls to the walls graphics. It's always been about customization and settings so you can tweak the game to your hardware.. But this has limits.

I get that but 2 years ago when they started hyping up the game, all those amazing screenshots they previewed must have been marketing BS then. They should have never done that if they were mostly making a PS4/XB1 game with GW features. Seems unfair to PC gamers that they created so much hype.

Also, I wish the Ultra settings were what the trailers showed and it did take 5+ years to max the game out on the PC like the original Crysis. Of course it's nice to know for 980 and 980 SLI owners that the game will run smoothly on Ultra but at the same time you gotta admit that is disappointing based on what we expected. I wouldn't have minded Titan X OC SLI being required to max the game out at 1080P alone. After-all, you couldn't max out Crysis 1 on 8800GTX Ultra SLI, or even 280 SLI. The game will still look great on very high settings but I was hoping on Ultra it would look spectacular like those screenshots/trailers they teased us with -- it's moments like these that makes you really want to upgrade to next gen cards, at least for me.

In many ways the old art direction was more mature, which imo is preferable.

 

[Carfax83]

Curious to know what your explanation is for how 980 is 50% faster than 780Ti, how 960 OC is just 6% slower than 780Ti, how 770 scales perfectly against a 680 but 780Ti hardly scales against the 780, and how the Titan X hardly scales against a 980? Sounds like an amazingly optimized game engine!

I don't know. You might as well ask why a GTX 980 with only 2048 shaders and a 256 bit bus can beat a GTX 780 Ti with 2880 shaders and a 384 bit bus.. Obviously Maxwell is just a much more efficient architecture than Kepler, from both an power consumption and performance perspective.

I know that compute performance is a factor, but there are also plenty of other factors as well I'm certain.

If AMD's DX11 driver was so awful, switching from W8.1 to W10 would do nothing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzFe5OOHZko

Right, so according to you AMD is using a DX11 driver under Windows 10, which uses DX12? :whiste:

Not to mention there is a major GPU under-utilization issue with AMD cards in Project CARS and performance goes up 20-30% from moving the PowerTune to +20% without doing anything else.

This is likely just one of the many driver issues that AMD has to sort out..

Where did you see benchmarks of Hairworks of NV vs. AMD for TW3? I don't think we can pass judgement yet.

Not TW3, Far Cry 4. Judging by the performance of AMD in Far Cry 4 with hairworks, they are not that far behind NVidia.. But to be sure the Hairworks in TW3 will be much more sophisticated than what was seen in FC4..

Hilarious, 14% performance drop from Rockstar's shadows despite having inferior IQ. GW FTW! :biggrin:

Um, I don't think so. Does Rockstar and AMD's solution use a variable penumbra algorithm like PCSS?

Doesn't look like it judging by those screenshots you posted. PCSS has a higher performance hit, because it's more realistic in the sense that it's calculating distance from the light source and the surface the shadow is being cast on..

 

[escrow4]

Good post by Russian as usual. What was cut out was what always murders performance - lighting and shadows closely followed by particles and foilage in this game in particular. You gut that and tired old "next-gen" consoles can run it. And you gut it by lowering and/or obscuring draw distance, remove fancy lighting effects (look at those screens on p.34, where are the pretty sun shafts and pretty reflections - why is everything so flat and 2011?), fiddle with fire effects and cut right back on shadows. Thing is, the Red engine is supposed to be scalable yet looking at all these recent videos the devs removed all this permanently. There are no (real) "Ultra" slider/options on PC at all. You can't flip on more lighting and more everything. Its gone. And that quote:

"So to add more detail to the lighting, the whole world is covered in “lighting and reflection” probes, that analyze the surrounding area and light it accordingly. It does a pretty good job."

You really mean we had to gut the lighting and this was the best we could slap in that didn't kill the consoles. Sure plot and gameplay is critical (V's plot was horrible) but its 2015 and a game like this really should shine on PC except it looks like it won't. Going off those screenshots I'm happy I didn't bother buying a Titan X here - $1600 for a downgraded game?

 

[Carfax83]

You are saying it's OK to lie and show trailers of a PC game that we would never get? What was the point of that then? Also, some of those screenshots are from gameplay trailers.

Unfortunately, that's standard operating procedure in the game industry. All the devs do it, and it works. It builds a massive amount of hype for the game.

I'm not saying I like it, but I understand that there are too many technical and business obstacles to delivering a game of this magnitude at that level of graphics.

Also, I wish the Ultra settings were what the trailers showed and it did take 5+ years to max the game out on the PC like the original Crysis. Of course it's nice to know for 980 and 980 SLI owners that the game will run smoothly on Ultra but at the same time you gotta admit that is disappointing based on what we expected.

The main reason why Crysis took so long to max out was because it was a big, detailed game that used a single thread for rendering. GPUs would have maxed it out sooner if they hadn't been limited by the API.

As for the Witcher 3, I definitely wouldn't like it to be like Crysis. The primary purpose of graphics in video games is to increase immersion. As such, the Witcher 3's graphics is already very immersing in my opinion..

Call me old fashioned but I don't play games for their graphics. I play for their plot, gameplay, characters first and foremost.. Graphics is icing on the cake..

There's always room for improvement, but considering the sheer magnitude of the game World, it's a very impressive feat what they've managed to accomplish; especially with limited manpower.

I challenge you to name a single OPEN WORLD game that can equal what we've seen in the Witcher 3.. And don't say DAI. DAI is impressive, but it's much more limited in scope and complexity. Same with GTA V..

 

[Carfax83]

I'm going to hold off final opinion until I play the retail release. Everything we've seen up until this point has been preview builds, so lots of things could still change.

One of the easiest ways for them to dramatically improve IQ would be to allow ambient occlusion on the foliage. That's the main reason why the foliage (especially the grass) looks so flat..

 

[RussianSensation]

I'm going to hold off final opinion until I play the retail release. Everything we've seen up until this point has been preview builds, so lots of things could still change.

One of the easiest ways for them to dramatically improve IQ would be to allow ambient occlusion on the foliage. That's the main reason why the foliage (especially the grass) looks so flat..

Remember how you and I even talked among each other how TW3 was supposed to use global illumination and real time lightning vs. AC Unity that has pre-baked lighting model? Well they literally removed that major aspect out of the game. The other part is remember how you even mentioned yourself TW3 showing extensive use of tessellation on castle/city walls when Geralt would ride into the city? Ya, that's not there anymore either. Essentially they promised us 1 thing and delivered another. I am not a fan of over-promising and under-delivering when a major developer like that publicly mentions these things to hype the game from a technical/next gen point of view.

Plus, all those other things I mentioned like the draw distance with shadow/object pop-in. That is very disappointing considering a lot of PC rigs have 16GB of system memory and flagship GPUs have 4GB+ of VRAM alone. I mean Dying Light managed incredible draw distance and it's a very good looking title.

Also, you say that HBAO+ can fix some of the flat foliage but that fire just looks terribad. Maybe that footage was from the console version?

You are absolutely right that most people will enjoy the game and that it will probably be the best looking open-world game to date. My point was that the developer seems to have compromised the game heavily to be able to run it on consoles and the PC version does not look like the very best version they could have made for us.

Maybe they were pressured by MS/Sony to not have the PC version of the game look miles better to make the consoles look like turds? I mean I am pretty sure a PC with dual Titan Xs and 5930K OC should be able to handle way better graphics than what a 980 with an i5 can but if the developer held back the next gen graphical aspects, then we'll end up with a game that runs at near 50-60 fps on a 980 at 1080P on Ultra, which isn't exactly pushing the technical boundaries they promised to us 2 years ago.

I mean literally this is what they were trying to pass off as "in-game graphics"

 

[RussianSensation]

VS. what the game actually looks like barely 1 week before launch:

The game still looks gorgeous but not like those marketing screenshots they fed us for 2 years. It is still extremely beautiful but I admit I fell for the unrealistic hype based on those screenshots I posted in the post above.

 

[pandemonium]

The game looks completely different. After your guys' recent posts, I went looking and compared preview gameplay videos from years ago to recent and became incredibly depressed. It's bad when it's easily recognizable from videos and not actually playing it. Now, it looks like any other AAA title that's released in the last 6 months and that's extremely disappointing.

TW3, you were supposed to be the one. The one! :'(

Edit: Supposedly it's being said that there may be a graphics embargo until release, so it won't diminish XBONE and PS4 sales. Maybe hope is still around...

 

[futurefields]

The game looks completely different. After your guys' recent posts, I went looking and compared preview gameplay videos from years ago to recent and became incredibly depressed. It's bad when it's easily recognizable from videos and not actually playing it. Now, it looks like any other AAA title that's released in the last 6 months and that's extremely disappointing.

TW3, you were supposed to be the one. The one! :'(

Edit: Supposedly it's being said that there may be a graphics embargo until release, so it won't diminish XBONE and PS4 sales. Maybe hope is still around...

What did you expect suddenly someone is going to come along and be able to make PS4/XB1 graphics look twice as good? These boxes are tapped out and it's simply not in their best interest to have the console versions that far inferior to maxed out PC version.

 

[Annisman*]

Have faith in CDPR boys ! Stand fast !

 

[Igo69]

Looks like those photos are from consoles and not from pc.

 

[Lonyo]

Looks like those photos are from consoles and not from pc.

On what basis? In the third one it says "gamepad detected". That's the sort of thing you would expect on PC not on a console.

 

[Fenixgoon]

i'm hoping those images are from "default" settings and you can tweak things through files (or failing that...mods)

 

[mmntech]

I've been seeing people kicking up a stink about the graphics on other sites. Still looks good to me, but I agree it's not even a step above Witcher 2. Which is even worse when you consider the game's high minimum system requirements. Par for the course these days though, unfortunately.

 

[zinfamous]

Witcher 2 is on rails. This one is open world. Comparing something like draw distance between the two isn't useful.

 

[Carfax83]

Remember how you and I even talked among each other how TW3 was supposed to use global illumination and real time lightning vs. AC Unity that has pre-baked lighting model? Well they literally removed that major aspect out of the game

I think you are misremembering. The Witcher 3 never supported global illumination, much less real time global illumination. This was disclosed fairly early in the game's development when they were looking at various techniques. It didn't take them long to settle for some kind of image based lighting technique..

Real time global illumination is still a ways off for open world games. Might have to wait for DX12 and 16nm GPUs for that..

The other part is remember how you even mentioned yourself TW3 showing extensive use of tessellation on castle/city walls when Geralt would ride into the city? Ya, that's not there anymore either. Essentially they promised us 1 thing and delivered another. I am not a fan of over-promising and under-delivering when a major developer like that publicly mentions these things to hype the game from a technical/next gen point of view.

You're definitely misremembering. Witcher 3 uses tessellation for the terrain and for the water. I don't think it uses tessellation on surfaces like castle walls or buildings of any sort.

Plus, all those other things I mentioned like the draw distance with shadow/object pop-in. That is very disappointing considering a lot of PC rigs have 16GB of system memory and flagship GPUs have 4GB+ of VRAM alone. I mean Dying Light managed incredible draw distance and it's a very good looking title

.

I agree that Dying Light has impressive draw distance, but so does the Witcher 3 from what I've seen as it uses Umbra 3.. Pop in is always going to be unavoidable because every single major 3D engine these days uses streaming technology.

Also, you say that HBAO+ can fix some of the flat foliage but that fire just looks terribad. Maybe that footage was from the console version?

HBAO+ can definitely fix the foliage, though not 100% fix it. The grass doesn't seem to cast any shadows whatsoever. The best foliage I've seen uptodate is in Far Cry 4..

You are absolutely right that most people will enjoy the game and that it will probably be the best looking open-world game to date. My point was that the developer seems to have compromised the game heavily to be able to run it on consoles and the PC version does not look like the very best version they could have made for us.

Until we see what final quality looks like, there's no way to say for sure. Ultra quality will not be the highest quality settings. Usually to get the highest quality you need some mix of custom settings..

Maybe they were pressured by MS/Sony to not have the PC version of the game look miles better to make the consoles look like turds? I mean I am pretty sure a PC with dual Titan Xs and 5930K OC should be able to handle way better graphics than what a 980 with an i5 can but if the developer held back the next gen graphical aspects, then we'll end up with a game that runs at near 50-60 fps on a 980 at 1080P on Ultra, which isn't exactly pushing the technical boundaries they promised to us 2 years ago.

As I said above, ultra quality likely won't be the highest setting in the game. And a GTX 980 is a beast of a card, so it's not like it's some mid range GPU.

Just a little over a week left until we'll know for sure I'm going to post a lot of screenshots, and I plan to max out the game as far as it will allow me to @ 1440p whilst achieving 60 FPS..

 

[Carfax83]

i'm hoping those images are from "default" settings and you can tweak things through files (or failing that...mods)

Devs have stated many times that all of the official screenshots use high settings, so they are not ultra or the highest settings that you can achieve.

 

[Gryz]

Got a suggestion for you.

Don't pre-order the game.
Don't buy it on the day of release.
Wait a week.
Read reviews. Don't trust the first wave of reviews.
Read forums. Try to distil the truth out of all the mixed opinions you will read.
Look at all the screenshots posted by different people.
Check Jim2point0. If a game can look good, he will be able to make it look good. If even he can't make a game look good, then you know the graphics are bad.

Then after a week, make the decision to buy the game or not.
You'll be playing the game 7-10 days later than many other people.
Would that be so bad ?
At least you keep control over your own anger, your own disappointment and your own money.
Maybe give it a try.

 

[Merad]

Don't pre-order the game.
Don't buy it on the day of release.
Wait a week.
Read reviews. Don't trust the first wave of reviews.

Actually the "first wave" of reviews will be dropping either Monday or Tuesday, a week ahead of the release. I think CDPR is pretty confident in their product.

 

[Merad]

Steam is running TW1 on sale for $1.50 and TW2 for $3 this weekend. Great time to grab them if they aren't in your library yet.

 

[GoodRevrnd]

I gotta roll my eyes at people potentially not buying the game because the graphics aren't good enough.