Gadgetory

hey Ron this is Steve from gamers Nexus Donna and today we're talking about optimizing your graphics settings for The Witcher 3 now The Witcher 3 I called very poorly optimized just a couple days ago in a video card benchmark we looked at all the video cards performance in The Witcher 3 show the FPS things like that requires a lot of hardware to play it properly and the graphics settings weren't terribly optimized now thankfully patch 1.3 just came out by CD projekt red and this improved performance tremendously for the PC this is something that we've shown in our testing so we're back today to show you how to go through the settings in the Witcher 3 describe all the settings like chromatic aberration and things like that and tell you how to tune those so that you get more performance out of your card without choosing just one of the flat preset the high medium low ultra settings the problem with just choosing high to recover some of your framerate so you're sitting at 40 or 50 with Ultra is that you can actually just change normally one or two settings rather than all of them across the board so you can have a better looking game and you don't have to sacrifice as much as long as you make more careful adjustment to these settings so this is something we studied this is already in full article form on the website and I've categorized all the settings from critical to negligible performance boost depending on how you tweak them in the game so you can check that out for details I'm not going to talk about every single setting in this video I did in the article but that's just not time friendly so we're starting with the most critical item which is Nvidia's hair works hair works is a part of the game works SDK that Nvidia provides developers and pair work specifically tessellate s-- hair in a fashion that basically creates more strands of hair and then it also adds some physical impact so when you're moving the hair will actually sway side to side and you can see this in geralt's hair when he's bobbing around on the horse or whatever you can see it moves differently with this off in the form of growths we see that his hair has a more standard animation that looks as if it just sort of repeats every time the horse Bob's so it's less dynamic there's no physical computation going on to determine how the hair you and there's no tessellation craziness going on to create more strands of hair if you have it on all then everything like monsters Griffin's whatever all those things will now have tessellated hair it looks really cool it's very physically active which is cool but it's extremely intensive on the GPU whether or not you have Nvidia or AMD so here's a few things with this one here's the performance chart with the setting completely off you can see that we're salvaging like 20 FPS or more in some instances and with it on Geralt it's about the same but a little bit faster than with it completely on if you're an AMD user you can actually go into a renderer ini file and you can see the location of that file on our website and you can modify the hair tessellation quality for hair work so you can lower the quality if you want to use hair works and force it on an AMD card like a 290x technically it's compatible it's not optimized for it because nvidia has no business optimizing for andy's hardware so it's not the best in terms of performance but you can make it work the next most critical item is foliage viewing range this is basically the view distance of foliage at what point do plants and shrubbery and we inform things like that start popping up and popping as in the technical term here as in when does the object physically pop into view as you're moving closer to it because these things aren't necessarily rendered off screen you might be running straight forward and you start seeing foliage pop into view at the very end of your camera viewing distance and this is impacted by the foliage viewing range you can see in the charts I have here that this is actually the second or potentially first most heavily impacting item for frame rates in The Witcher 3 and you'll want to modify this and a hair works to get the biggest FPS boost out of your settings without dropping any of the other settings so that is the first item to see where this impacts the most we can look at these two screenshots I put them side-by-side and if you look at the far left side of each screenshot you'll notice that there's a field and also a stack of hay in the middle of the field in this instance the low setting basically does not even render that field so that's where you see the of this if that's something you really want then you're just going to need better harder because it is very intensive luckily this is not something that really impacts gameplay too much the next item is ambient occlusion ambient occlusion has been around in games for a while it is the means through which light interacts with objects in the game and how it interacts with translucent transparent surfaces so if you have like a car window and GTA s doesn't exist in the witcher obviously but if you have a car window or something the light will interact with that window in a certain way and this also is impacted by things like reflectivity and reflection settings if they're present in the witcher you can see ambient occlusion effect basically everything though you will see h bao most prevalently when you're in like a building that's got windows with the Sun to your back this is an example Nvidia put on their website and you can see how h bao is less crazy with overshadowing versus ssao ssao is the mid-range technology it runs best on both cards if you want some kind of a Oh but don't want H Bao and it very aggressively shadows objects so AO ambient occlusion is most commonly seen when services meet and shadows meat from variant services so a shadow cast from one service and another meat AO will dictate how they interact with one another and their host surface h bao is more aggressive with its shadowing but when necessary it'll back off the shadow in detail so like when you're standing in front of a window or right in front of a light source or the Sun it's not going to overshadow Kuralt like SSAO well this has marginal impact on performance and is worth tuning down to SSAO at the least or off if you really find no benefit from this and want the extra frames per second shadow quality is still impacting but only about 10 FPS when you're going from low to ultra so there's not a whole lot of room to play in the in-between settings here and shadow quality really just affects how things look when you're in a dense area with a light source that's cutting through or reflecting off of or interacting with multiple objects that cast shadows on one another it's not critical but it does actually add quite a bit of depth to the game if you can leave this on a higher setting I would recommend it it makes the world look less flat and ambient occlusion is the same way it's less flat with ssao grass density and the quality of grass is something that we talked about in GTA 5 luckily in the witcher 3 grass is much less impacting on the performance than in GTA 5 and you can basically leave this at a higher setting with almost no performance impact just modify those other settings first before you start touching this one anti-aliasing in the witcher 3 is actually a custom implementation by CD Projekt RED it is not compatible to witcher 3 with other TxAA or FXAA technologies that are standard the engine just can't do it so they have a custom implementation it's very low impact on performance from our testing and to this end you can pretty much leave it enabled it mostly just works temporally meaning that the anti-aliasing in The Witcher 3 is looking at frames over time and then trying to smooth out the shimmering effect applied on things like grass strands that are really thin so it makes them look more dense and more there's more continuity in your graphics texture quality I already talked about in depth in another video so I'll skip that but basically you can leave it at ultra and it's it's perfectly fine almost no impact on FPS bit of impact on the RAM check the other video for that and then we jump into some of the other negligible items detail level impacts the decals how long they last and when they're painted so decals are things like blood splatter and scorched earth when you're doing anything with fire that has basically no impact on FPS from our limited testing this is very difficult to test in depth for the same reason that you need dynamic combats really start generating a lot of details and that reduces the ease with which you can reproduce a test so it makes it sort of difficult to validate things but in general you can leave it fairly high water quality has almost no impact on fps before other things start choking at first and water quality just changes like the wake that's behind Goro out when he swims changes the splashes when you jump into the water and stuff like that background characters we could not test Nvidia didn't either we checked with that and this is because the thresholds for background characters need to be met at 75 100 130 or 150 for low medium high ultra respectively and I couldn't find a place with that many characters in one spot and I definitely don't have the time to actually play the game to get that far because I'm benchmarking it so - not something we could test unfortunately blur and motion blur basically no impacts don't need to describe those because they're just how blurry the screen is when you move around a lot of people dislike this and will just disable it because they don't like how it looks you might find that to be the case as well there's no performance impact and no functional gain terrain quality is a tesselation feature that seems not functional right now and terrain quality is supposed to test like the land if you have a higher so that it looks more detailed but it really doesn't seem to be doing that right now and I'm getting no FPS change in my testing bloom has a very large impact on the visuals of the game and whether you like it or not is really a subjective thing luckily there's really not a performance difference as with all these recent items because it's just a filter it's applied on top of everything else that's already rendered all the hard stuff like geometry it's already rendered so this is filtering the light to create images like we're looking at here where the Sun is it has a bloom effect or where fire would have the shimmering heat effect over the flame that is bloom as well now all the other settings I described very briefly in our previous video chromatic aberrations a photography term I talked about a little bit and it's discussed in the article in full check the article for more information on anything I didn't touch on here but this should get you started for tweaking your game so you can get more performance there's also ini tweaks you can do so if you're comfortable with playing around within any file as they're called then you can change the values in those files to increase or reduce the quality level objects drawn tessellated elements and things like that actually get more performance out of your game or more visual fidelity depending on how powerful your hardware is and that's something I'll try to talk about in the future if we don't move on from The Witcher here in the next few days but for now check out the links in the description below for the full article if you like this content please subscribe we try to do these for every major game launch and definitely do things like this for all the major video card CP launches and speaking our CPUs I'm trying to type CPUs on The Witcher 3 very shortly so subscribe for that if you like our objective and journalistic approach to coverage please check out our patreon page it's a new campaign we're starting to try and get these things going at a faster pace increased quality or building a video set bought some expensive lights the other day so I don't have to have lamps in each corner as I've said in a few videos now and that's pretty much all for this so I will see you all next time you