Conclusion

The Witcher 3 is another masterpiece I've played for a few hours and can't wait to get back to. The world is immersive and believable, full of little details that add to that effect. In terms of graphics, it's not the best we've ever seen, but quite close to it. Hardware options are aplenty; the game definitely feels like a PC-first title.

Overall, the game is quite demanding on the hardware. You at least need a GeForce GTX 970 or, better yet, a GTX 980 to run somewhere around 60 FPS on full HD 1080p at Ultra. Users with AMD Radeon cards will definitely have to sacrifice some details, so AMD will hopefully release an updated driver for the game rather sooner than later. On the NVIDIA side, recent cards based on the Maxwell architecture are doing much better than their Kepler predecessors, which is due the Tessellation improvements in the new architecture. As expected, the GTX Titan X dominates our benchmarking charts, but even a single Titan X is not fast enough for fluid 4K gaming. My recommendation for 4K is a GTX 970 SLI (because of its awesome price-to-performance ratio) or Titan X SLI setup if you have money to burn.

AMD's current driver works very well for single-GPU setups, without causing obvious issues or rendering errors. CrossFire is different, though. The lack of a CrossFire profile sees no scaling on the R9 295X2, and I also spotted some slight visual corruption, which, while not game-breaking, is still annoying. NVIDIA, on the other hand, was proactive and released a perfectly working driver even before the game released to give gamers the best-possible experience as soon as the game unlocked.

On the topic of NVIDIA Hairworks: While it certainly looks cool to show off technology, I feel as though it makes no difference when actually playing the game. It does cause a huge performance hit, though, which is mostly due to the fact that hair is rendered at 8xMSAA. You can tweak the settings by editing the HairWorksAALevel in the game's bin\config\base\rendering.ini. On AMD cards, you can also use CCC to limit the Tessellation level of the game, which effectively improves Hairworks performance. For this article, I've decided to simply turn off Hairworks since the majority of users won't manually edit their config file.

Personally, I'm gaming on a GTX 980 with a 2560x1600 30" monitor. I have everything set to Ultra, Hairworks off, Shadows at Medium and Grass Density at High. I turned off most post-processing effects, but left anti-aliasing on since it only results in a small performance hit.