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The Witcher 2The game needs optimization for low end machines(25 posts)(25 posts)
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Posted May 18, 2011
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cjrgreen: Even at low settings, double-check to be sure you have the expensive eye candy turned off (SSAO and Ubersampling are the most costly). If you have recent nVidia drivers, uninstall the 3DVision crap.

Your CPU may be the bottleneck. Even though it's a Core 2 Duo, it's a weak one. And 2GB memory may not be enough on any OS. Any chance of upgrading either?

I can play at High without SSAO on an 8800 GTS 512, which is just a step up from your card, so the graphics card should not be limiting.
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QueenCercil: As far as I know 3D Vision is not installed on my system. The install/unnistall only shows the drivers, PhysX and nView.

By the way, I tried running the game with High settings (SSAO disabled) and guess what? I get the same framerate as with everything disabled (1366x768). The only difference is that I have some little stutterings here and there.

I forgot to say I'm running the game on x86 XP SP3.
I don't think XP SP3 would cause a problem at all. The more I look at things you tried without getting anywhere, the more I get concerned about the CPU and RAM.

I'm going to see what happens if I downclock to where I'm equal to your CPU.

Followup: Yeah, framerate (especially minimums) can be bottlenecked by a slow CPU, even on low settings. I lost 6 fps by dropping from 3.33 GHz to 1.9 GHz. That's twice the hit I take going from Low to Medium on an under-spec HD 5670 GPU.

I'd look to upgrading your CPU and RAM, if it's possible in your rig.
Post edited May 18, 2011 by cjrgreen
Posted May 18, 2011
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C17: Most PC titles support the 360 controller because of GFWL, also I would imagine it is not hard to implement. Considering in the 90's many PC only titles supported controllers and joysticks.

Second, when has CD Projeckt Red ever made a console title?
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cloud8521: seeing as they have only made the witcher sofar. none

they were going to port the witcher to other systems but they used a 3rd party that filed them so the refused to make their payment to them.
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Gidzin: If you have a console it'll be ported soon... look how the menus are set up and the Field of View is ganked in this "PC" game. Sugar they have options for XBOX controllers in game already.... I predict this will go console soon enough with all the graphics de-emphasised. The menus speak louder than words AND the devs have already said they designed this with a view toward consoles. Thats why there are only 4 buttons for combat 2 for quick/strong and 2 for spell/bomb. The old Aurora was Biowares PC engine and would not port easily to a console. My Opinion only.
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cloud8521: there nothing wrong with the FOV, the camera is just too high up! they centred the camera on his head, which makes for alot of useless area above his head
Post edited May 18, 2011 by Gidzin
Posted May 18, 2011
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SSMChan: My system is also older and maybe a bit worse than the OP (Athlon 64 x2 @ 3 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 8800GTS, WinXP). I knew I was going to have to run at lower settings but the high bar for graphics settings had also caught me by surprise. But I tend to choose performance over eye candy and so wasn't too bothered about tweaking everything down until its at a framerate I am happy with.

Texture Downscaling seemed to have made a big difference for me. I've set it to "Low" at the moment and I think it still looks pretty nice. It was actually quite tolerable at "High" as well and in general you'll only really notice during the close-ups (conversations, etc). You might want to try this, since you are running at a low-ish resolution anyway. If you check the config files and have a look at the texture sizes the game is working with, they are pretty scary big by default.

Depth of Field, SSAO, Motion Blur, and UberSamply are big performance killers.

There is weird freaky stuff to do with VSynch that makes the mouse go all laggy for me and makes everything feel slow. I turned it off and while the frame rate might not be better per-se, it certainly feels a lot better.

The Bloom isn't as horrific as I had feared, and so I'd left it on.

I am running @ 1600 x 900, Low Texture Downscaling, Small Texture Memory Size, Bloom and Vignette enabled, and everything else turned all the way down/off. And I am pretty happy with performance and feel it still looks pretty darn shiny. I might put Texture Downscaling to Higher at some point once I get a better feel for things, since I feel it still looks OK.

Note: The readme file has a much better description of the graphics options than the manual (which was pretty much useless for this).

Now if only I can tweak what the heck it is doing with my sound/speakers. I'll rather force the game into stereo than to have to mess around with my global speaker settings each time.

Good luck.
Thanks for the tip. The game is running a little better without drop too much from 20 FPS at 1600x900 resolution.
Posted May 18, 2011
Glad you got some tips that keep it playable. Really though a dual core and 8800 are pretty ancient now. With new consoles hopefully coming and a renewed spark in PC interest it would be a good time to save up for that next machine.
Posted May 18, 2011
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StingingVelvet: Glad you got some tips that keep it playable. Really though a dual core and 8800 are pretty ancient now. With new consoles hopefully coming and a renewed spark in PC interest it would be a good time to save up for that next machine.
The 8800's not a problem, other than it doesn't have enough memory. It was a superb card for its time and still leaves many mid-level cards eating its dust. A dual core CPU, especially a slow one, really holds you back.
Posted May 18, 2011
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StingingVelvet: Glad you got some tips that keep it playable. Really though a dual core and 8800 are pretty ancient now. With new consoles hopefully coming and a renewed spark in PC interest it would be a good time to save up for that next machine.
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cjrgreen: The 8800's not a problem, other than it doesn't have enough memory. It was a superb card for its time and still leaves many mid-level cards eating its dust. A dual core CPU, especially a slow one, really holds you back.
I think there's a combination of effects, none of which are a huge oversight in the game, or a bug or whatever. The game seems to be optimised for quad-core, and dual is really pushing it. I think 2GB of ram is really too small. You'll end up falling into swap file and that's the No.1 best way to cripple performance.

Lastly, I think the game has simply been designed around a base level of visual complexity that some older generation 512mb cards hare having trouble keeping up with. There's just a lot of data to pump through compared to the average cross-platform game, where vertex counts are kept down to very tight quotas to ensure they'll fit the memory/bandwidth capacity of the consoles.

I suspect there may be further optimisations to come from CDP in patches, and from nVidia/AMD in drivers... but I wouldn't hold your breath for more than a few percent.
When all said and done, mid-range dual-core chips, 2GB ram, and aging GPUs combined aren't going to give the most fluid experience.

It's a shame that lowering settings isn't having enough effect though... like I say, it seems that the sheer geometric complexity of the game sets a fairly high bar for minimum requirements.
Posted May 18, 2011
AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5400+
4.00 GB
NVIDIA GeForce 9500 GT
2815 MB Total available graphics memory

720p
tex downscaling : Low
tex mem: small
lod distance very near
AA enabled
decals: Medium
everything else is low or disabled.

Looks fantastic and runs smoothly. That is the single most important aspect for this game. If the battles were choppy the whole thing would just suck. I can turn other things up if I go lower resolution but then the text gets a bit blurry.
Posted May 21, 2011
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QueenCercil: Thanks for the tip. The game is running a little better without drop too much from 20 FPS at 1600x900 resolution.
This is an older thread now but I thought I'll append a discovery I made over the last couple of days. I read this someplace else and tried it to confirm it was true. It seems that the predefined low/mid/high settings change settings you otherwise cannot change through the various options. In other words, if you set the predefined "High" setting then disable everything etc, it will be more demanding on your system than if you start from "Low" setting and set all the options to exactly the same.

As I understand this is mostly to do with texture sizes. So leaving Texture Downscaling on "off" starting from "High" results in more detailed textures than than if you also have Texture Downstacling on "off" starting from "Low".

I'm rubbish at explaining this, but the end result is for best performance, first select the "Low" predefined option, then change the other settings. I have got very noticeably improved performance this way, though the textures were also muddier (but the strength of the game is in Art Direction anyway - super details are just icing on the cake).
Posted May 21, 2011
Depending on your card, even if its a low end card, upping the Texture Mem seems to help some. Also setting Dangling Objects Limit to Enabled helped boost my fps some too.
Posted May 21, 2011
If you have an ATI card you should get a hotfix for it, it really speeds things up. I got everything maxed out besides ubersampling it is off and the bloom is also off and I get about 40 fps constant.
That's with an ATI Radeon HD 4850, 2 gigs of ram, Windows XP, Dual Core AMD processor
Post edited May 21, 2011 by Shock2k11
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The Witcher 2The game needs optimization for low end machines(25 posts)(25 posts)
(25 posts)