What are you playing it on?

On the same graphics card since yesterday, and i didnt have any troubles there :P
(geforce GTX 970)

After leaving the starting area on the way to vizima the video crashed and locked up my game, had to kill the task.
I did get a massive bump in FPS but still too unstable to play.

I concur, no performance increase for an R9 280X (rebranded Radeon 7970). Most of the optimizations I think favour Nvidia users (Hairworks for example). The only slight performance increase i've seen is that shadows no longer have as large of an impact for me, but I still run them on the lowest settings since the visual improvement of increasing shadows to maximum is quite small and I'd rather have the extra framerate so that I can run hbao+ instead of SSAO.

I think it is doubtful that you will get a constant 60FPS unless you do run at low settings; realistically though you should be able to get reasonable performance around 40-50 fps with many settings set to ultra with the exception of some settings like hairworks (Write it off, it's a nvidia feature, perhaps revenge for AMD's exclusive TressFX in Tombraider), and Foilage visibility range (High).

Just to add (and actually answer your question, sorry!), running at 40-50fps for me appears is a lot more smoother than running at 30fps.

My graphics card fan isn't so loud anymore, so I guess there's some improvement.

yeah. I got some performance increase

Yes I did, a minor one. My settings are all on high accept ultra texture quality, full hairworks, low sharpening (high is too much). I tweaked hairworks in the INI to have 0 AA and frankly it's barely noticable while at the same time improving the framerate with hairworks on full by 90%.

EVGA GTX 770 Superclocked
Intel I5 3570K
ASROCK Z77 Extreme6
G.Skill 1600mhz 8g
Samsung EVO 850 500gb

Edit: Just wanted to mention how impressed I am with this games loading speed. Comparing to say DA: Inquisition (which had fairly large areas) the difference is night and day. It's quite the achievement considering the vast size of Velen. Not to mention the load speed when fast traveling from one end of the map to the other takes a few seconds at most.

I got a boost and hairworks also runs better.

I got an increase from the patch and I also got an increase by back dating to the previous Nvidia driver.