Salutations.

short story, It makes my eyes burn. see image:

http://i50.tinypic.com/2lclg60.jpg

not only does it make the game physically unplayable after more than 15 minutes, it's flat out frigging ugly.

and it's not like that new fangled game engine of theirs can't survive without HDR:

http://i48.tinypic.com/2b8zmw.jpg

just go to menu and suddenly it looks lovely.

Is it only me who has this problem? I am somewhat surprised that people aren't angrily petitioning at CD projekt

Basically, yeah. That's not how the game is supposed to look, so something is obviously wrong. Could be an install problem (did you click through any errors?), or some kind of mod incompatibility if you're using any mods. Anyway, you'll have the best chance of someone determining what's wrong if you ask at the official forums. In the meantime, you might try updating your drivers and/or reinstalling.

Also, try a clean reinstall of your graph drivers, that manages to solve many problems similar to this one.

well, I bought the witcher 2 a while ago. It had the same problems back then and I thought it might be because my video card was somewhat old. I don't think its related to drivers because I've basically changed computers since. While the frame rate is higher now, the lighting is still unbearable. I don't know if it's just the training level or something general though.

I have an AMD radeon HD 6670 card now. I'll try re-downloading and re installing the game. maybe it patched itself wrong.

I've seen oversaturated HDR effects like this in other (older) games in combination with antialiasing. Maybe it helps if you disable it.

On my 5850 I had the same problem when I used AA enabled in the catalyst control center. So that could be it indeed.