The first benchmarks of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt are here.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is already available and the first real benchmarks have not taken long to come to light, showing something that we already stated more than a year ago: it is possibly the game with the highest system requirements to date. . To give you an idea, running the game in Full HD resolution with a GTX Titan only gives 30 FPS on average.
The example that we have given you is with a plain GTX Titan, which until not long ago was the most powerful graphics card in the world. But it is that the game is so demanding that even with a GTX Titan X we only get 60 FPS on average in Full HD resolution, although that is, with Ultra graphics and all NVIDIA GameWorks special effects activated.
The first benchmarks of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt arrive
We start with the first benchmarks, executed in Full HD resolution (statistically the most used by Gamers), with graphics settings in Ultra and exclusive NVIDIA effects such as HBAO+ and HairWorks disabled. In all cases, the latest drivers from both NVIDIA and AMD have been used, including the Game Ready ones that NVIDIA has just released. The result is as follows:
At 1920 x 1080 with Ultra settings we would need an AMD Radeon R9 285 or an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 just to have an average of 30 FPS and for the title to be minimally “playable”, although as you well know the requirement for Gaming we set it at 60 Stable FPS. To get 40 FPS on average we already have to go up to a Radeon R9 290 or a GTX 970, graphics cards that already cost 300 euros. Of course, if the graphic settings are relaxed a bit, those desired 60 FPS on average are easily obtained with these graphics.
The bad news is that if you’re a Geforce GTX 700-series owner, you’ll need to turn the graphics settings down quite a bit to get a decent gaming experience. For some reason all the GeForce GTX 700 and 600 series have a very poor performance in The Witcher 3 (note that even the top of the range of that generation, the GTX Titan and GTX 780 have a rather mediocre performance, curiously 50% below of their AMD counterparts, the R9 290 and 290X).
Now let’s see what happens if we enable the “Pantene hair” effect, NVIDIA Hairworks:
If we compare the result obtained with Hairworks on and off, we have that the performance decreases by approximately 22% in all GeForce GTX 900, 700 and 600 series. In AMD GPUs with GCN 1.2 architecture like Tonga, this figure is doubled (-44%) and in AMD graphics with GCN 1.1 (Hawaii) the performance penalty triples compared to NVIDIA graphics. The result is disastrous.
Unfortunately, CD Projekt Red has said that this HairWorks effect cannot be optimized for AMD graphics because of the GameWorks program, which as you well know is exclusive for NVIDIA graphics.
So far we have come. Undoubtedly, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt becomes the new benchmark for PC graphics requirements in the same way that Crysis was in its day. Some media, in fact, have dubbed it “GPU Destroying Monster”.
However, keep in mind that AMD has yet to release its “Game Ready” drivers for The Witcher 3 with specific optimizations for its graphics cards, and the game developers themselves will surely release patches to improve performance (and to add support). to DirectX 12 when available). In any case, you can always lower the graphics settings a bit to improve performance.
Graphics courtesy of PCGamesHardware.de
