re: Witcher 3 Gameplay

I was considering pulling an all-nighter tomorrow night with this game and taking a vacation day. But then I was handed a short-turnaround project Friday afternoon with basically no breathing room. If I'm lucky, I'll actually get to play for about 2 hours tomorrow.


The PC community is pissed because the graphics were "downgraded." In other words, the PC community isn't getting some mega-super enhanced graphics version that somehow magically runs at 60fps 1080p with maxed settings on $100 video cards.

PC community has just become accustomed to the PC/last-gen console graphics disparity. They also seem to forget that this game was unveiled nearly a year before the XB1/PS4 were released, before we even knew the specs of those consoles. Ultimately, the devs needed the game to run on the console hardware. Imagine how downgraded the graphics would look if they were aiming for 60fps on those consoles. On the other hand, if the graphics were enhanced across the board for PC (or had stayed the same since the early 2013 unveiling), people would be bitching about higher hardware requirements, because I bet a lot of the people who are mad about the graphics downgrade haven't upgraded their GPUs since the XB1/PS4 were released. Can't win with those people. The alternative is the Ubisoft treatment, where the game has mediocre graphics and runs like shite.

Nvidia's chart is pretty promising:



Every setting/hardware config listed in that chart apparently guarantees a minimum of 40fps in the most graphically intense areas. If true, it means a $300 video card with 4GB of vram can run it at high settings at 1440P or max it out at 1080P, which is exactly where it needs to be. We shouldn't ignore the fact that at equivalent settings, a gpu that can push 1440P at 60fps is doing over 5 times the work of the xbox one at 900p/30fps and over 3.5x the PS4 (1080/30fps).

It looks like I will be able to run it at 1440P with all the eye candy, or pare it back a little for 4K DSR.