Gadgetory

what's up guys welcome back to the channel today we're doing something a little bit different than the everyday unboxing or review today I'm gonna be checking out the Witcher 3 which is an awesome game from from what I've heard I've actually never played the other witchers and I've never even started playing this game until about a day or two ago but I've actually had this game for quite some time now for a couple months a few months ago my good buddy cell cell processing go ahead and follow him on Twitter he gave me a game code to this game mainly for benchmarking and I haven't gotten around to it because I've just been so swamped up until now so I thought I would do a video on it now granted there are a ton of Witcher 3 PC performance videos already on online some which are really good in fact if you haven't seen Joker's content go ahead and check out Joker productions on YouTube he does some really great Witcher 3 content with his ridiculous gaming PC and you should just subscribe to his channel in general because he's got a lot of good tech content out there but I figured I would still chime in with my two cents no J pun intended just because every system in every scenario and every user is gonna be different speaking of which I've got a hotline PC I say that like it's some mass manufacturing thing oh it's one of those hotlines this is Highline my custom water-cooled PC that I built a few weeks a few months ago it's got a 59 60 X as well as two gtx 980ti s in sli very high-end gaming machine so because of that I'm gonna be gaining at 4k that's the resolution that we're gonna be focusing on for the purpose of this video and I'm just gonna see what kind of quality settings I can get away with and also we're going to be checking out things like hair works why don't we just jump right into it hey let's let's do that I'm gonna give you a look at my system settings alright so you can see I'm running a 4k as I mentioned actually let's look at the post processing I am not enabling anti-aliasing at all simply because at 4k you really can't tell the difference in some games you can there are some games where I've noticed the difference like in GTA 5 I can tell I can tell there's a little bit of jaggies I mean it's just a little bit but it's there I can't tell at all in Witcher 3 so I'm leaving it off at this resolution just because it'll give me a lot more a lot more performance in the long run of course now even more heavy heading than anti-aliasing is Nvidia hair works and when you when you actually enable this setting in gain it automatically applies an 8x msaa filter to all the hairs that are being rendered primarily the hair that is on the protagonist in this game his name is Geralt I'm gonna pronounce that wrong at some point if I aren't already I'm not already so it applies an 8 X NS a filter to his hair which is pretty intensive and you take a huge performance hit because of that and there's no way in game to actually bump that setting down you either have 8x msaa or you have hair works completely disabled but why don't we just dive right into exactly how to change the various quality settings of hair works so like I said you have to go out of the game it's not there and I already have the window popped up here so in my local C Drive I've got gog Games sorry steam I betrayed you this time around and in The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt folder you're gonna go to bin and then config and then base and in the base folder you'll find resources go ahead and click that opens up this nope it's not resources I take that back it's rendering open up rendering close resources open up rendering I'm not gonna edit that out I don't care and at the bottom here towards the bottom you'll see a line that says hair works AAA level equals and then a value and obviously like I said it's gonna start off at 8 8 X msaa you can change that value excuse me mm to 4 2 or 0 each one going down in quality but also stepping up in performance which equates to more frames per second and I actually have a chart here that I created look at all this fancy stuff fancy data I love charts charts and graphs and and lines and numbers they're great so keeping in mind this is at 4k this is being tested at Ultra settings and average frame rate on the left side here so just starting off on the right side and it's kind of weird but this is hair works disabled and I was getting 60 67 frames per second on average without any kind of hair works at all as soon as I enabled it which is 8x by default it dropped all the way down to 53 frames per second on average which is a huge huge hit granted his hair looks super sexy but honestly not worth it so what happens if you crank it down to 4x MSAA what is the performance cost versus the cosmetic effect so you do go up 3 frames per second on average which is a decent bump I suppose and that's with very little to no degradation in quality as far as like the naked eye could see I couldn't really tell much of a difference other than the very tips of the finer strands of hair that's when you really start to see a drop off in qualities with the really fine tips of his hair but even then at 4x msaa I didn't see too much of a difference so if you are gonna if you are inclined to chase that eye candy and you do want hair works enabled I would suggest 4 X msaa as the happy medium when you go to 2 X msaa you do go up one frame it's really not that big of a jump but here's where you really start to seem even larger drop-off in quality as far as the the little texture the aliasing on your drawer Jerald gerelds hair damn stupid folklore names gerelds hair really starts to deteriorate a little bit even at the top and at 0 x msaa it's just jaggies everywhere jaggies on the the tips jaggies on the top of his head and this isn't only noticeable in in certain dialogue scenes but also just when he's you know a medium distance away from the camera when you're walking around in the environment you can actually see the jaggies on his head because the hairs are so close together that it kind of creates this weird screen door effect across the entirety of of his hair and it looks a bit distorted and it's really distracting to be honest so don't even bother with 0x MSAA either do two or four but eight is the other extreme that I wouldn't bother with because four looks just as good as I mentioned now another thing worth mentioning is that when hair works has enabled regardless of which MSAA quality you habitat the hair on Geralt in particular looks pretty stunning I have to admit it is kind of gimmicky but when you're zoomed in really close which obviously 95 99 % of the game you're not but when you are the level of detail is pretty epic and you can actually see the hair appears a lot more lifelike it kind of like flows and the way it blows in the wind it's what we call physics folks the physics on the hair is really good and it kind of swishes on his back and his shoulders very organically and it is very pretty when you're actually up close and can actually see it now on the other hand when you have hair works disabled a lot of that goes away the hair all of a sudden looks a lot more animated it looks a little bit more cartoonish and you kind of lose that organic natural lifelike feel there's less movement overall in the wind especially and the hair kind of no longer swishes but it just kind of hovers over the back of his the back of his head and his shoulders and stuff like that his hair also just kind of looks a little bit more dry which i think looks just fine and it looks even better when you realize that there's like fifteen to twenty percent performance increase with his hair looking that way as opposed to sexy James Bond slicked back with gel if you call it Nvidia hair gel not hair works that's my recommendation but yeah so as you can see I'm not a huge fan I'm not really sold on the hair works thing unless you just have the ridiculously over killed system of your dreams and you can go balls to the wall my conclusion is that eye candy seekers will want to put hair works at at least 4x and above I guess for extreme smoothness but that's going to come at the cost of a major performance head and even high-end dual GPU setups like mine will have a hard time consistently averaging 60 frames per second at those particular settings so I say in the end not really worth it alright so switching gears here from all that hair work stock I'm gonna show you guys basically the the in-game quality settings that I'm using currently with my ridiculous system at 4k you would think like you could just run this game at Ultra and no problem with my setup having two gtx 980ti x' and at first i thought that would be you know quite possible as well and real really the answer is it is but what am I was my horse doing right now I cannot come on Roge my system can handle this game at Ultra at por quê however you're gonna be dipping into the low 50s at your worst so and those really graphically intensive scenes mainly in combat and like just tons of like foliage on the distance you are gonna be dropping into the lowest low 50s which I feel is a bit too choppy for my liking if you go to high settings your average my average was 68 frames per second and my minimum at any given point was 58 now that 58 actually happens very infrequently even graphically intensive scenes you're still getting 60 61 it's only just in those rare instances when you dip into the really high 50s which I'm okay with because there's absolutely no noticeable change in gameplay it doesn't seem choppy at all like it does in the low 50s so I'm okay with with going from ultra too high especially at 4k now what are the other quality drawbacks from going from Ultra to fork from ultra to hi excuse me and honestly they're not nearly as bad as I thought they would be for one you don't get quite as many nice shadows way off in the distance obviously this is a really expansive open environment another thing you might notice going from Ultra to high settings is the grass density now this doesn't change nearly as much as it does in a game like GTA 5 for example when you go from ultra to high it's just like where the hell'd all the grass go it's just like a huge difference but in Witcher 3 there really isn't that much of a difference and you can see here from some of the screenshots it really is quite negligible and I honestly didn't even notice that some some grass was missing going from ultra to high until I actually had both of those pieces of footage played back-to-back and lastly the other thing that you might notice going from Ultra to high settings is just the level of texture detail this includes things like the sheath on Gerald's back or maybe some of the tessellation that's on his outfit some things like that stand out a little bit but honestly really not too bad I have to commend the developers for making this game so damn scalable even not even when the settings aren't maxed out it still looks incredible I really can't tell I mean maybe I just haven't played it long enough but I can't tell high from ultra when I'm just when I'm in games someone could just switch my settings on me last minute and I would happen but there you go that's pretty much gonna wrap it up for this video guys I know it was kind of haphazardly thrown together and probably wasn't the most polished hopefully you guys appreciate the raw format from time to time I know I do it's a lot more casual and a little bit more enjoyable sometimes but thank you all for sticking around so go ahead and toss me a like on this video if you enjoyed it subscribe to my channel if you haven't already and I'll see you guys in the next one