First of all, good to see that GOG got a dedicated Witcher 3 forum going. I hope that will reduce the flood of Witcher 3 threads in the general forum. They should probably post some notice, if they haven't already done so, to make it easier for people to find this sub-forum. Either way, here's yet another W3 thread!

Got my retail copy today and was able to test it for a few hours, so I felt like sharing some thoughts on the game, in particular about ( potential ) technical issues. Perhaps it will help some of you have a smoother experience.

I'm running the game on a Core i5, 8GB RAM and an MSI GTX 960 Gaming 4G. Custom settings with most details/features set to "High", Texture Quality on "Ultra" and HBAO+

Exceptions:

Chromatic Aberration OFF - Because, no. Just... no.

Hairworks OFF - Because the impact on FPS is rather dramatic, especially in close-ups of hair/fur. I really wanted to use this feature, but in its current form it feels kind of "gimmicky" and unoptimized, like they only put it in to sell high-end Nvidia GPUs. The good news: To my surprise the plain old ordinary hair graphics look really good! Regular hair is quite detailed and mostly well animated, so don't feel too bad if you miss out on this feature.

With these settings the game looks great and I get surprisingly good performance. Average frame rate seems to be in the 40 - 50 range, and ( so far ) things rarely get choppy, except perhaps for some cut scenes.

The AA technique used by Witcher 3 is apparently some custom mix of FXAA and TXAA(?), which does a solid job at improving image quality without a heavy performance hit.

About V-Sync: This is an odd one. At first I head heavy problems with image tearing, during cut scenes as well as gameplay. I toyed around with various setting for a while ( in game, and via Nvidias settings manager ). Setting the in-game FPS limiter to 30 didn't seem to do anything. Eventually I set it to 60, despite rarely reaching such framerates, and that seems to have fixed all or at least most of the tearing issues. Don't ask me why, but hey, whatever works.

Overall, if you have a similar system, or plan to buy a similar GPU, you can expect performance and image quality that compares favorably to the PS4 version. Not bad at all for a medium range graphics card.

I hope what I've figured out so far helps some others. I might update this later, after some more playing ( and toying with the game settings ).

I also have a question about hairworks: Apparently it uses integrated 8xMSAA, so it doesn't turn into a pixelated mess, which would explain the heavy performance hit. According to some of the config files this could possibly be adjusted to 2x or 4xMSAA. Perhaps there's hope for a less resource-hungry version of hairworks after all? Does anyone know for sure if and how this could be adjusted?

Would also be great if CDPR could patch in an option to control the max number of rendered hairs in close-ups, since it currently goes up to absurd numbers ( 100k+ ), and that's when performance tanks.

P.S.: Once properly set up, the game itself is of course excellent. Looks great, too! Downgrade my ass.(*) My thanks and congrats go out to the whole team at CDPR and GOG for all their hard work. Here's hoping the game, as well as their DRM-free ideology, will turn out to be a huge success for them. Oh yeah, and I'll make sure to buy those expansions in the upcoming months. :)

(* Please don't. )