My four years old PC (which is a Core2Duo E4600, 2GB DDR2 and 8800 GT) can run most games on Medium/High settings at 30+ FPS and 1600x900 and in some cases even at 1920x1080.

The problem is The Witcher 2 is barely playable with low (everything on low) settings and 1366x768 resolution. I have no stutterings at all which helps a little, but the framerate is terrible. I get 15-25 FPS in outdoor areas and 25-30 FPS indoor.

I have noticed that even on low settings the game still has decent quality shadows, draw distance, bumpmaps and other stuff that can be disable for performance gain.

I hope CD Project implements a Very Low settings for low end machines, turning the shadows off and reducing the draw distance so I can run the game at 30 FPS in the least.

I care not for the visual quality. I just want a smooth gameplay so I can enjoy this game properly.

It needs optimizations for all machines.
Do you have the new Nvidia beta drivers? They help the framerate a lot.

I don't think the game needs "Very Low", it just needs better optimization and better gpu drivers. My pc is also 4 years old but thanks to the fact most present day pc games are only console ports it handles 95% of them on high settings. Witcher 2 it can't handle well, either on High, Medium or Low. Funny thing is on Ultra with SSAO, Ubersampling and AA disabled i get the exact same framerate I get on High and Medium. We need a patch and we need better ATI drivers, not new settings ;)

Optimization is needed, however I am quite sure the Witcher 2 will never be ported to a console ever.

Yes I have. It helped a little (+2 FPS), but it's far from ideal. I don't think the game will be ported to consoles while a computer that's considerable faster than a x360 and PS3 can't handle the game with low settings.

Even at low settings, double-check to be sure you have the expensive eye candy turned off (SSAO and Ubersampling are the most costly). If you have recent nVidia drivers, uninstall the 3DVision crap.

Your CPU may be the bottleneck. Even though it's a Core 2 Duo, it's a weak one. And 2GB memory may not be enough on any OS. Any chance of upgrading either?

I can play at High without SSAO on an 8800 GTS 512, which is just a step up from your card, so the graphics card should not be limiting.

I totally agree with you. I was afraid that the game would not really be very playable even at close to recommended requirements and luckily my friend was kind enough to borrow his copy to confirm my fears. So instead of being able to play through the game quickly as he works his ass off I spent 2 hours trying to get the game running decently and then chugged through the prologue only to see that it would get way worse in chapter 1.

Hopefully not too far in the distant future they will manage to optimize the game so that it will be at least playable ( 30fps) because I don't wanna miss out on this game and it's gonna be at least a few months till i will be able to upgrade my computer ( Has to pretty much replace everything ). Also please release a demo when you have made the game more optimized so that we can actually see it for ourself instead of having to rely on people saying "Hey this game runs a lot greater after last patch".

Personally I don't care what the game looks like as long as it runs good.

Oh and my spec if a E8400 ( 3.0ghz), 4gb DDR2 and a 9800GTX

What I meant with out saying it is, the game was built for next generation computer hardware. It does need optimization, but how much they can do is in question.

Think of the Witcher 2 as the Crysis of the PC RPG world.

If you have a console it'll be ported soon... look how the menus are set up and the Field of View is ganked in this "PC" game. Sugar they have options for XBOX controllers in game already....

To be fair considering how poorly a lot of console games run I wouldn't be so sure that TW2 for X360/PS3 would be that great either. Also despite the console UI TW2 suffers from I still would prefer playing it with a mouse

Most PC titles support the 360 controller because of GFWL, also I would imagine it is not hard to implement. Considering in the 90's many PC only titles supported controllers and joysticks.

Second, when has CD Projeckt Red ever made a console title?

seeing as they have only made the witcher sofar. none

they were going to port the witcher to other systems but they used a 3rd party that filed them so the refused to make their payment to them. there nothing wrong with the FOV, the camera is just too high up! they centred the camera on his head, which makes for alot of useless area above his head

The game runs worse than Crysis 1 on high on my PC and looks worse. There is something fishy about the performance. I hope they fix it by patch.

As far as I know 3D Vision is not installed on my system. The install/unnistall only shows the drivers, PhysX and nView.

By the way, I tried running the game with High settings (SSAO disabled) and guess what? I get the same framerate as with everything disabled (1366x768). The only difference is that I have some little stutterings here and there.

I forgot to say I'm running the game on x86 XP SP3.

My system is also older and maybe a bit worse than the OP (Athlon 64 x2 @ 3 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 8800GTS, WinXP). I knew I was going to have to run at lower settings but the high bar for graphics settings had also caught me by surprise. But I tend to choose performance over eye candy and so wasn't too bothered about tweaking everything down until its at a framerate I am happy with.

Texture Downscaling seemed to have made a big difference for me. I've set it to "Low" at the moment and I think it still looks pretty nice. It was actually quite tolerable at "High" as well and in general you'll only really notice during the close-ups (conversations, etc). You might want to try this, since you are running at a low-ish resolution anyway. If you check the config files and have a look at the texture sizes the game is working with, they are pretty scary big by default.

Depth of Field, SSAO, Motion Blur, and UberSamply are big performance killers.

There is weird freaky stuff to do with VSynch that makes the mouse go all laggy for me and makes everything feel slow. I turned it off and while the frame rate might not be better per-se, it certainly feels a lot better.

The Bloom isn't as horrific as I had feared, and so I'd left it on.

I am running @ 1600 x 900, Low Texture Downscaling, Small Texture Memory Size, Bloom and Vignette enabled, and everything else turned all the way down/off. And I am pretty happy with performance and feel it still looks pretty darn shiny. I might put Texture Downscaling to Higher at some point once I get a better feel for things, since I feel it still looks OK.

Note: The readme file has a much better description of the graphics options than the manual (which was pretty much useless for this).

Now if only I can tweak what the heck it is doing with my sound/speakers. I'll rather force the game into stereo than to have to mess around with my global speaker settings each time.

Good luck.