MercilessHobo: I'm a bit disappointed. I got a full pc built with an FX-8350 and GTX 970 today specifically wanting to play The Witcher 3. After multiple crashes I found my problem but it's a bummer. Every single time the older man says we need to take Ciri to train, Geralt turns around to walk away, the screen fades to black, and my entire PC freezes with no display and a buzzing audio sound. This is the ONLY game this happens on. I found a forum where someone said reverting to Nvidia driver 350.12 and turning off HairFX stopped crashes, and it actually worked for me. Reverted to 350.12 and turned off the hair, ran fine. Clicked hair back on and the SECOND I left the menu my system crashed again. So I can't use the latest drivers with hairfx on OR off, and I have to make sure to leave them off with the 350.12 drivers. Now the real question lies, is this an nvidia problem or a Witcher problem? Has anybody else had this issue and do you have any better solutions that reverting drivers and disabling one of my favorite visual effects?(I HATE the default animated hair, so ugly)

So far very disappointid with this game. Haven't even gotten through the tutorial yet. Now that I know I need to run 350.12 and disable the hair fx I can play fine, but I'm very disappointed.

gunsynd: I'm gonna say Nvidea as their updates aren't reliable.

MercilessHobo: Thanks for the reply. I'm a new Nvidia user so I wouldn't know. Been using AMD gpus for years. Ironic that everyone talks down on AMD drivers and I never had a single problem, yet my first nvidia gpu which is supposed to be an amazing price to performance card can't even use the latest drivers without crashing one of the most popular games on the market. Game is running super smooth 50-60fps now. All maxed at 1080p except the hair and motion blur(don't like the look of blur).

Lieste: I'd go with "something else".

Maybe that driver is flaky... but I've been using hairworks on, a several flavours of NVIDIA driver (including todays beta hotfix for the TDR issue).

I do have some crashes but over 500 hours only a few dozen or so... and as many when just browsing the internet or using a spreadsheet.

Current 353.38 (TDR hotfix(beta)) is at least as stable as anything before (and is *supposed* to fix the instability).

You shouldn't be having excessive issues with hairworks and a 970 though (it does impact framerates a bit ~ not an issue for G-Sync monitors), but it should still be fluid and stable.

My MSI GTX970 4G has been running (mostly) ultra with hairworks (4x MSAA) since day 1.

Had some significant instability issues early on which I traced to remnants of 2012 drivers.

Removed all NVIDIA drivers, folders, applications and registry entries and installed a 35x.x series driver and had acceptably stable perfromance since. There has been a mild issue with TDR being off and restarting the driver... this has been the most common failure mode with a loss of the displayed game, but continuing running (esc and waggling the mouse permits using the menu to exit normally... using audio cues).

GrayBlondie: I'll second this, it sounds like something weird is going on there. Running a 970 as well and I've had decent performance since I bought the game. Hairworks doesn't crash the game, though it understandably knocks some frames off. Everything else on ultra, with some tweaks above ultra. Getting 50-55 fps unless Geralt's hair fills half or more of the screen, in which case I get nasty drops haha

You might try a clean uninstall/reinstall of the drivers and verifying the game cache if you haven't already. Haven't heard this issue yet :/

MercilessHobo: Already done a clean install of drivers, verified game, checked for updates, done everything. Strangely enough using the W8.1 version of 353 on W8.1 caused immediate crashes, but the W10 version of the driver on W10 preview(just installed yesterday with the new driver) runs a lot smoother. It still crashes every couple hours though which looking through google seems to be VERY common. Hairworks runs fine, all ultra settings getting steady FPS. But then at random areas it decides to crash. Like the botchling section when you first find it for instance. Died twice because I had no consumables, third attempt at a spot I had already passed twice it just randomly crashed. Temps fine, cpu usage around 40-50%, gpu usage 98-99% which it always is, nothing changed. Just a completely random black screen crash with static sound and having to hard reset. It also crashed while following the Wild Hunt guys through the cave, restarted my system booted up the game and it ran fine through the same area. No other game does this. Not one. It's definitely either the driver or the game.

elldaz: Hi sounds like people above have given you a solution but one other random thing you can check which was a problem for me playing Dragon Age Inquisition and caused crashes was:

1) My GPU comes OC'd and I had to dial it back to its base
2) and this is the weird one. Apparently when you do a driver update for Nvidia it automatically updates the NVIDIA HD Audio Device and makes it the default sound device. If you are already using a dedicated sound card such as SB X-fi it can cause conflicts with the GPU and cause crashes. You can disable the Nvidia HD in the device manager.

As I said it fixed huge problems for me with DAI, if you are still having issues maybe try that.

GrayBlondie: I can confirm that resetting to base clock may help you. I have done that for more than one game, though not this one. There's nothing wrong with it, and you'll still get good performance. I know it can be frustrating, but it's worth it to make the game run. Somtimes it takes little tweaks to make games run satisfactorily, unfortunately.

MercilessHobo: Nothing wrong except losing several frames per second and not getting your money's worth on your GPU when you paid slightly more for an SC version. A game should be able to run without crashing without you having to limit your hardware. What is it with game companies thinking games not working is okay? Witcher 3 is crashing ever few hours for countless people, and Batman can't even get through the first scene(another big reported problem). I will wait for the next patch and if it still doesn't work I might try downclocking. But it's ridiculous that even has to be considered as an option.
And in case anyone is worried I'm taking my frustration out on you guys trust me I'm not. I'm very grateful for the replies I've gotten and appreciate the support. I rarely see such great support among communities so it is a nice change of pace. I am frustrated with the game developers and Nvidia's programmers.

GrayBlondie: I understand, no worries here. In the case of Batman, it was an optimization issue that was so bad they stopped selling the game on PC and still have not resumed sales. That one is on Warner Bros/Rocksteady/that 3rd party company they pawned the PC port to.

In the case of The Witcher 3, I think it's just such a big undertaking that issues like this are going to be around for a bit. CDPR isn't the biggest studio. I say this as someone who hasn't had severe issuse though, so take it with a grain of salt. I know it sucks to underclock your GPU but I really think you're looking at a difference of maybe 2-3 fps. In the past when I've reverted to base clock I have not noticed a performance decrease (not that it isn't there, it's just not noticeable to me).

In case you want to check out some tweaks that don't require reverting to base clock you can have a look at this thread on the CDPR forums: http://forums.cdprojektred.com/threads/36088-A-compendium-of-tweaks-and-fixes-for-the-PC-version
It's been very helpful for me and the tweaks are very well explained. Hope those are of some value :)

MercilessHobo: Wow they had to stop selling the game for now? That's intense. Didn't hear about that. My copy still won't get past the custcene after the bus evacuation(if you've played it or seen gameplay you know that's the beginning). Thanks for the support bud. I'll check out that link and see what it has to offer as far as tweaks go. Even if they don't solve the crashing there seems to be some nice graphical improvements available. Thank goodness I have other games too from my old PC gaming days.