Witcher 3 Benchmarked, GTX Titan Does 30FPS At 1080P And Ultra Settings

The benchmarks have just arrived, showing that The Witcher 3 could quite possibly be the most enervating game we've e'er seen thus far. I've heard your audible gasps and your shouts, how on earth would a GTX Titan just muster 30 FPS at 1920x1080 ? Before some of you lot start seizing in daze I have to quickly bespeak out that I'm referring to the original GK110 based Kepler Titan not the Titan 10. Merely even and then a xxx FPS average is notwithstanding unprecendently low for what was the fastest GPU in the globe not long ago.

The game is and so demanding in fact that non even a GTX Titan X can manage a sixty FPS average with GameWorks effects enabled at 1920x1080. Information technology'southward non all bad news however, because the game has the visual quality to show for it. In fact The Witcher 3 might just exist the virtually beautiful Open World RPG at that place has e'er been. Have a wait at some of the published 4K screenshots and gauge for yourself. Now earlier whatever further delay permit's get directly into the numbers and what they mean.

Initial Witcher 3 Benchmarks Arrive, Beautiful Visuals Come up At A Steep Price

Let's begin with 1920x1080 benchmarks running at the Ultra preset with GameWorks furnishings ( HBAO+ and HairWorks ) disabled. These results are courtesy of PCGamesHardware.de, and then many thanks to the expert folks over at that place. These tests were conducted with the latest drivers from both AMD and Nvidia, including Nvidia's recently launched Game Gear up drivers for The Witcher iii.
Witcher 3 Benchmarks, 1080p No GameWorks
At 1920x1080 and with Ultra settings you will want at least an AMD Radeon R9 285 or an Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 but for an average of 30 FPS. Which is frequently too slow and inclement for most PC gamers
If you want a more than reasonable mid 40s framerate y'all will want to step up to an AMD Radeon R9 290 serial card or an Nvidia GTX 970.
We're fairly certain that if a couple of settings are turned down to loftier or medium, an boilerplate of 60 FPS will be attainable with $300 grade GPUs like the 290 and the 970. While 45 FPS may be accessible on the $200 course cards similar the 285 and the 960. So that's the proficient news.

The not then good news yet is that if y'all're an owner of a GeForce GTX 700 series carte du jour y'all will need to turn the settings considerably down to attain playable framerates. Because unfortunately just every bit I had mentioned at the get-go of the commodity. A GeForce GTX Titan but manages an average of 30 FPS, which is actually just one FPS ahead of the R9 285. In fact all Nvidia Kepler GPUs ( 600 series and 700 serial ) show about catastrophically poor performance. If yous look at the GTX 660 for example, which is a card that competes with AMD's R9 270, information technology's nearly performing at half the charge per unit of the slightly faster R9 270X with a 13.6 FPS average compared to the 24.2 FPS average of the 270X.

The GTX Titan and GTX 780 too perform quite poorly, falling behind their Radeon counterparts the 290X and 290 by nigh 50%. Nosotros see this trend with older graphics cards from Nvidia'due south GTX 500 series and AMD's Hd 6000 series also. Which indicates that Nvidia's Game Set up drivers are just optimized for Maxwell based GTX 900 series products. And will need some serious optimization work to bring the Kepler based 600 and 700 series products up to par.
On the Radeon side we really see surprisingly stiff performance for an Nvidia partnered title. The results are more inline with how the cards would normally stack up against the competition. With the R9 290 and 290X cards performing similarly to the mill overclocked GTX 970 from MSI. And the R9 285 performing similarly to the GTX 960.

So now let's have a look at how the game performs with HairWorks enabled.
Witcher 3 Benchmarks, 1080p GameWorks On With game works off vs on we encounter an average difference in functioning of about 22% on Nvidia 900 series Maxwell GPUs and 700/600 serial Kepler GPUs. On AMD'southward GCN one.two GPUs like Tonga, nosotros see double that functioning penalty. And on GCN 1.1 GPUs such as Hawaii we see nearly three times the punishment seen on the Nvidia GPUs. This in part thanks to the architectural improvements that AMD introduced with GCN i.ii, particularly in relation to tessellation.

Unfortunately CD Projekt Cherry-red stated that this Nvidia optimized visual result cannot be optimized for AMD GPUs due to particulars related to the GameWorks program. This naturally acquired a lot of controversy as a result, which we distilled in an article detailing the notoriety surrounding the GameWorks program since its inception and up till today. Which you should really check out if you haven't already.

Before we move on, there's just i more interesting little point that I'd similar to quickly mention. In Bryan Burke's response to the GameWorks backlash, he substantially blamed the tessellation performance of AMD GPUs for how poorly HairWorks and other GameWorks effects ,which relied heavily on tessellation, performed on Radeon cards. Even so a quick look at the R9 285's tessellation functioning reveals that the situation isn't exactly equally Burke made out it to be. Based on tessellation operation alone, an R9 285 should see a comparable performance hit to the GTX 960 when enabling HairWorks.

However that'due south not the case, not even remotely. The R9 285 actually sees a performance penalty that's twice as bad as that seen on the GTX 960. And considering CD Projekt Blood-red and AMD are not allowed to work towards identifying and addressing the real culprit behind this poor operation in the game code we're dorsum to square i.

And then there you take it folks, Witcher is a GPU destroying monster. Hopefully we'll run across performance improvements with boosted patches, driver updates and most importantly DX12 support. Share your thoughts on the current situation in a comment beneath and stay tuned for our Witcher 3 review.