When you go outside to grab a smoke or get a sandwhich or deal with any annoying fact of life trying to take you away from your beloved game, you leave it running. But most screens in game keep the GPU running at full load, causing unnecessary stress on your hardware.

Solution?

Press "Escape." Click on "Gwent Deck."

Now your GPU can drop to 13% (number from 97% under TW3 full load maxed out with my EVGA GTX 970 FTW Edition) and stay in "standbye" till you return to continue on your monster slaying and whoring endeavors.

:D

Great ;-)

You can also simply open up your inventory (press 'I') for the same effect.

But the CPU still runs full throttle, even when tabbed out!

Nice tip. Sadly doesn't work when the annoying facts of life interrupt me during a conversation.
But there's nothing I can do then, I guess.

My GPU doesn't chill out when I have anything like Inventory, Bestiary, Journal, or Map up. Only the Gwent Deck seems to let it rest. My CPU only slows by around 8%, which could be attributed to anything. Like PC just let out a big one and breaths a sigh of relief syndrome. Fortunately, this life altering syndrome only affects 1 in 10 PCs world wide. To donate to the cure, send me $1,000,000 in pennies. Rolled pennies.

I thank you for your time and caring contribution. Yeah, my CPU doesn't relax much either. I have an FX-6200 running with my 970 FTW Edition. But, despite being an old and sub par processor, maxing TW3 only takes 50-57% of my 6-core's processing power. Running stock cooler (plus thirteen 12cm fans in positive pressure airflow system) with no overclock on it. Just monitoring software. Never goes above 48 degrees Celsius either. FPS is above 50 all the time with every option on Ultra running at 1080p resolution.

People have complained a lot about this game being hard to run but I have a pretty average system with a shite motherboard holding it together and I have had zero problems. Hair Effects doesn't affect my FPS at all.

On a side note. I will also take your donation of $1,000,000 in Canadian nickels.

It's possible that mine does because I'm running borderless window mode -- makes it safer to ALT+TAB out of the game.

No more than 58 degrees, ever. Borderless Window Mode is harder on your hardware. You'll get more FPS in Full Screen if you don't have a $2,000 system. Also, minimizing The Witcher games, all three, doesn't stop your hardware from fully rendering. The Witcher 2 had no way to give your system a break when you stepped away and 3 is similar, minus the Gwent Deck screen.

No it isn't. It entirely depends on your hardware. In fullscreen my SLI cards scream to overheating point. They do not in borderless window mode. That's another reason I use it.

I disagree with that based on my experiences. Just offering solutions that are working for me that others may utelize them in this thread.

Another option to lower CPU usage is to lock your FPS at 30 or 60 before you put up your Gwent Deck screen and minimize the game. This lets my system drop to 40-60% CPU usage while away. I just overclocked my FX-6200 to 4.4Ghz today so I've been playing with some other things to see how efficient I can get the system to idle while I'm out smoking.

Hope this helps!

Oh! Almost forgot. Locking at 60 FPS also allowed my CPU to stay under 70% usage while maxing the game at 1080p/60hz. That was before my OC to 4.4Ghz while the FX-6200 was at 3.9Ghz and remains just as benificial now. More so even because of the extra stress of my OC on an air-cooled beast.

EDIT: After overclocking to 4.4Ghz and testing via maxed out TW3, unlocking my framerate to "Unlimited" while in Full Screen allows for MUCH better performance. But, when stepping away it still is accurate that locking the FPS allows my CPU to rest more easily, until I return to garner every working milimeter of that card for my entertainment.

Lots of people are reporting high CPU usage, even with i7's and AMD 8-cores and GK-110. GM-204, and GM-200 chip GPUs.

OT. Man I admire your courage with all the heat sweltering India right now. I bet you are inside an air-conditioned room though hehe.

Not for me. Some days it's 41°C in my room. I had to open up my rig and point a small fan directly to it just to keep my gpu from over-heating at times my gpu temps peaks at 81°C.

Fortunately, I haven't seen artifacts on-screen or suffered stability problems.

I've heard Zotac is a decent company but never owned anything other than EVGA and NVIDIA refurbished video cards. I keep my house cool, in southern USA so it's hot down here too. My card runs between 40 and 58 degrees Celsius under up to 99% load while playing The Witcher 3.

I envy you. There are times that I would be checking up my gpu just to see if it's already flaming up because of the heat and the noise it is making.