Curious if there's a simple fix that would explain my poor performance. I am using an AMD A-10 laptop, which is low-end by modern standards, but it can run Mass Effect 3 on highest settings plus FSAA at a baby-smooth FPS.

For Witcher 2, I have to use lowest settings and additionally hack in a super-low resolution (853 x 480) to get > 20 FPS.

Often in a situation like this, it's due to a specific setting or glitch rather than just generally bad programming.

Are there any hidden settings that result in night-and-day performance improvements on select configurations that otherwise don't play nice?

Not sure what you mean in saying "no one ever "solved" the performance troubles". The game was patched and runs fantastic. Are you running a mobile gpu besides the one attached to your cpu? What version of the A10 are you using? Granted, Witcher 2 wasn't meant to be running on laptops which is why, I'm guessing, you're getting such terrible framerates. That would be the equivalent of trying to run Crysis 3 on it as well. The engine running Witcher 2 is a beast for the 2nd game and everything was improved 1000x over.

Have you tried playing at your native resolution and just lowering the settings? Light and shadows are what kills the fps. Turn off AA and AS.

Other than that, you could pretty much build a really, really nice pc for the same amount you'd drop on a new PS4 and it'll even run the Witcher 3 pretty great.

This article might interest you:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/trinity-gaming-performance,3304.html

It's not bad programming. The Witcher 2 engine is simply too powerful for your machine. You need a discrete graphic card if you want to get decent FPS. Sure, you might optimize your system and milk a few more FPS but I don't think it will be enough. Maybe give Razer Game Booster a chance. I never tried it but from what I read it's decent enough if you don't want to do the optimizations yourself. Also, the rest of your system specs are important too, not just the APU. The amount of RAM, if you have SSD or HDD, all this is very important.

To get an idea of how powerful Witcher 2 engine is, if you want everything on ultra (including ubersampling), you need a top tier gaming PC. And that is with today's technology. I think when it launched 4 years ago you might have been able to run in at ultra if you had two of the top graphic card of the time in SLI. In a way it's similar to the first Crysis, but not that bad.

In fact to get ultra in Witcher 2 with ubersampling you still need SLI cards. I have an i54690k OC's and a GTX 970 card. I still can't run ultra with ubersampling. I can run ultra without ubersampling but need two video cards if I canged this setting.

Simply put Witcher 2 was extremely demanding on hardware and Witcher 3 seems to be the same.

Thanks for the serious replies.

I run Witcher 2 on ultra with ubersampling on at 1080p with 30 Plus FPS running on a single GTX 970. Don't need a second card to make it playable.

Yeah, that's my observation, as well. :)
Edit: The only thing that destroys the performance for me is übersampling.

Okay since you guys keep going I well as well. Many others have been similarly frustrated.

It's not just a situation where the graphics are so amazing that a low-end computer couldn't handle them. The enhanced edition was optimized to run fine on last gen consoles and arguably looks even better than the pc version due to changes in color palettes and whatnot. Modern crap laptops can vastly outperform last gen consoles. Obviously the hardware spec comparison is not apples to apples, but a pc that can run a given last gen console game with better-than-console resolution and settings should similarly be expected to do so with any game released across platforms if adequately optimized. As such, one would expect that a pc that can run PS3 era games on better-than-ps3 settings would be able to run the Witcher 2 at the lowest settings at 30 fps.

See these threads

http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/the-witcher-2-horrific-performance-issues-steam-version.707834/

"I don't know why W2 is hard to run, it actually ran on my system better when it first launched. When the game was bumped up to the enhanced edition is when my performance dropped."

"Now I am above the official minimum requirements (NVIDIA 8800) and have a very low native resolution. So what is going on here? I mean, I knew the game was meant to be demanding but com'on even Crysis 3 is more scalable while having higher minimum requirements (NVIDIA 450)!!! How does that even make sense?!!

The game looks so good, I am desperate to play. Why is performance so crippled?"

http://steamcommunity.com/app/20920/discussions/0/846941710539037095/

"I'm having a similar problem, i7 proc, GTX560M, 16ram, and it runs smooth only on low settings. I play Crysis 2 on high-ultra so I assume its not detecting my graphics card. Any thoughts on some troubleshooting steps? I've been at this for a couple of days."

Also not going to link but vaguely remember a Witcher the interview on gamespot where danny was saying the only thing he remembers about Witcher 2 was performance issues, and, conversely, a zero punctuation episode noting that the game had fantastic performance with a mid range laptop.

Would you please post the complete spec of your PC and the version of the Catalyst driver?

About the APU, they're rather powerful, but they need dual channel memory at high frequencies for full performance - this may be the bottleneck with many Laptops. An Upgrade might reduce your problems.

Thanks dude. Apu is a10 - 7300, branded as r6 graphics. Ram is 2x 4gb ddr 3 sticks running in dual channel. I suspect cpu is bottle neck; overclocking gpu clock has no effect on fps while disabling turbocore (paradoxically named, actually a throttling function to limit heat) results in about 20% fps boost. I am not optimistic it can be upgraded our tweaked further to dramatically improve performance sort of buying a proper gaming desktop. My interest in this thread was learning if any simple config variable was known to limit performance (by analogy, disabling EA's origin in game "feature" have me a 500% improvement in mass effect 1 fps). Doesn't sound like there's anything similar going on with Witcher 2

Just a thought: on my configuration, the tutorial part (which, as far as I remember, was added with the enhanced edition) is nearly unplayable, while the rest of the game works very well.
If you always stopped at the beginning of the game, may I suggest you to try and keep going?

I run a desktop with a Radeon 5750 and the prologue doesn't run well at all for me. There's a lot of geometry and models in those first few hours, but later on things calm down a bit and I enjoyed the game. I can run it at my native monitor resolution (1920x1080) but with low details, or turn the resolution down to 1280x720 and crank up a few things.

I'm in two minds about buying TW3 before upgrading my video card, which will also require a more powerful PSU to cope.

I just purchased an EVGA GTX 980 FTW and run the game with everything maxed with no dips below 50 fps at all. Mostly cruising at 60. My cpu is a 4790k at 4.7ghz

Yes I'd recommend you upgrade your gpu if you plan to play TW3 on PC. If you have a decent quad core cpu and 8gb ram, I'd highly recommend the GTX 970 G1 from Gigabyte. If you have the budget a 980 would be even better. If you don't want to spend quite that much look into an AMD R9 280X or 290X. Keep in mind that TW3 might be more optimized for Nvidia cards.

If you are not concerned with high fidelity you can always look at the GTX 960 or a R9 270X. Both of those would be a nice upgrade over your GPU and won't hurt the wallet as much. Of these 2 I'd perosnally go the 960 route for pure power:performance. I doubt you'd need a PSU upgrade to run a 960, it will only be drawing about 40W more and the performance increase will be very noticeable.

Edit: If you plan to game at 1080p try to get 3GB+ vram, if you are ok with turning down resolutions from time to time, 2GB will be enough.

From what I understand to run everything at ultra you need two GTX 980's in SLI. Heck Withcer 2 won't run ubersampling with a single GTX 980 so don't expect W3 to do it.