Yesterday I played the game a little then realized there was a new nvidia driver to download, so I did that. After i rebooted my pc and started the game up, I couldn't load any of my saves and crashes once it finished loading. I started a new game yesterday instead since I wasn't far and it worked fine. Resuming save files at the time worked mostly fine too. Now I'm playing again today and I can't load my newest saves again.

When I died in game and loaded any saves, the game ran at 1 to 6 fps and any inputs took several seconds to register. I had to exit to the main menu each time I die.

On top of this, the optimization is really bad. I think I'm being fair and accurate in saying that. I'm getting 40-50 fps in the White Orchard quest hub with Ray traced lighting on, all other ray tracing settings OFF, nvidia hair physics off, all graphics settings at High (non are above High at all), DLSS set to Balanced (not even on the highest DLSS setting here either) Other ray tracing games just blow Witcher 3 out of the water in performance.

My Specs are in the picture below.
the RAM is "DDR4 3200 (PC4 25600) "

Having the same problem I couldn't load any of my saves and crashes once it finished loading. So started a new game worked fine even tried saving and reloading all worked fine.
Tried to start up this morning the game crashes to desktop.

Hi, same here. It crashed once in White orchard. Now I got to Velen, played a few minutes and then it started to crash on every loading screen.
Little update. When i start the game, switch RT of, then it loads fine. If i try to turn RT back on, the game crashes again.

I turned off all ray tracing and now my game works. I also set everything else maxed out and now my framerate is 90-144 fps

Yeah - I got the same problem. I started a fresh game, and saved it the moment I got control (I always do that as a fast "bare" start point). After playing the game for a while and having maked several save points, I saved my game for the last time and quit playing. A few hours later I started the game and wanted to play from my save point. After the story resume video, the game tries to load and the rotating circle stops after a turn and I got a CTD with a message if I want to send my crash information.

After that I tried some earlier save point and also got a CTD. I also tried the auto saves with the same result. Th ONLY save point that does not crash my game is the very first one I made. In short - It looks to me as if that resume video causes the crash. That can be a coincidence of course, but the only save that does NOT show that resume is the very first scene with Jennifer and Ciri and the tutorial sequence.

After getting the game running by loading in that very first save point, I can load in the other save points and in most cases the game runs normal. But I said most cases, because it does not always work. The only remedy at that point is quitting the game and wait a few minutes for starting up and repeat the whole sequence.

For now I have uninstalled the game and wait until the problem is solved (I have send the crash reports every time by the way, so GOG must be aware what's going on). It's a bit sad, but not a biggie. I have a huge backlog, so I have enough games to keep me busy for a long time. I am playing Harvestella, Fairy Fencer F Advent Dark Force and Atelier Sophie 2 at this moment (I really hope GUST will publish their games on GOG sometime in the future), so I have time to wait until TW3 is fixed.

Oh - And by the way, I don't use any mod at all, so that cannot be the cause of the crash. The game is a completely vanilla fresh install. No old game save and .ini files, because I completely removed the save game directory and backed it up. This is as "clean" as you can get.

Let's hope it won't take long...

the crashes with Ray Tracing enabled are fixed in the latest patch, but I still can't stay above 60 fps with just ray traced lighting on and the other 3 RT settings off. I can turn the entire settings in the game to Low or off with just the 1 RT setting on and still can't stop dipping below 60 at 1440p.

I'm just not gonna use RT still until they fix it. The new textures and foliage and whatever else all look really good anyway, would rather put everything Ultra+ with no RT at all now and hit 80 to 144 fps.

hey guys i have crash problem too. I just go into the game and in a random place the game crashes to the desktop with the option to send a CDPR report.