Witcher 2

So yeah the story just keeps getting better and better. I am in Vergen right now...followed Iorveth's path. Kind of felt like I wanted to side with the Squirrels since they seem to be mighty oppressed and they are fighting for a free state where there's no racism and all that. Is it just me or is the EE edition a HUGE step up in graphics because the town is absolutely staggeringly amazing looking at 2560 x 1600 on a 30 inch monitor? Just wow.
 
Five months late but nevermind - http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/03/08/cd-projekt-will-never-use-drm-says-ceo/
The mistakes so many developers make, he argues, is that they fail to say who their game is for. And a big part of that is making sure gamers find out it exists in the first place. To do this, Iwinski strongly argues that developers need to be actively communicating with gamers, appointing one person on your team to be responsible for PR and marketing. Even if it’s just Twitter and Facebook, someone needs to be focused on it,

Another important thing to do is developer diaries. For the hits these get, it’s incredibly good value for money. Then of course there’s screenshots – something we can attest developers and publishers get wrong all the time. CDP took half a day to generate ten of them, slowing the game down, meticulously ensuring it’s well balanced, features crucial game content, and is eye-catching. Good grief, we wish more people followed those rules. Then there’s cover art, doing interviews, attending trade shows (by guerilla tactics if necessary, he explained, pointing out you don’t need an expensive booth to meet with press).

Also revealed were the nature of how the game sold. Remarkably, only 24% of copies of The Witcher 2 were digitally distributed. Retails was still a huge factor, but possibly because of the game’s huge success in Eastern Europe and Germany, where retail remains a dominant force. Because in North America things were quite different, where 70% of those 270,000 sales were digital.


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The Witcher 2: How CD Projekt sold over 1M copies of their PC exclusive game - and how you can, too.


Interesting numbers. I would like to know how many units sold in Europe were via DD. I'm guessing it's the reverse of NA situation.

Edit: I'm an idiot, it's easy to calculate. If 70% of NA sales are digital, that's 188790 units. Out of total 1M, 24% is 240K, 240K-188790=51210. There are 764900 units sold in Europe, out of those 51210 is 6,69%. So less than 7%, a surprisingly low number.

Edit #2: Wrong, it's 51210 for the rest of the world so It's actually 6,14% for all other countries.
 
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I just built my new PC and went to revisit Witcher 2. With the GTX670 and a 1440x900 monitor I can obviously run with everything maxed including ubersampling with no problem.
However, no matter what I do there is this weird hitching that isn't registered by fraps but is massively intrusive and makes the game unplayable. I mean it is horrifically bad.

Even on my old PC with a C2D and GTX260 I could play it better than this.

P.S. I'm not the only one and it's not an NVIDIA specific problem
http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?t=33977782
http://www.gog.com/en/forum/the_witcher_2/slight_stutter_hitch_with_vsync_enabled/post2
 
I seem to be having similar problems with my GTX550Ti ... only at a really low resolution it seems smooth mostly, but at native screen res, even if I kill all typical performance hogs in the settings, I have exactly the type of issues you describe. Using autodetect for settings doesn't help either.

Pity, because I just bought the game. Can't manage to get it running in 3D yet either with 3DTV Play/3D Vision.
 
Have you tried switching to maximum performance in your windows Control panel/Power options? IRC, it helped in my case... (or switching off Intel Speed Step in Bios)
 
Have you tried switching to maximum performance in your windows Control panel/Power options? IRC, it helped in my case... (or switching off Intel Speed Step in Bios)

Good tip! My DirectX10 PassMark rating went up from 13.3 to 34.5 frames per second ... !
 
Will that be an official patch on the game? I'm assuming so since he's a CD Projekt Red guy, but the post isn't clear on whether it's official (icons not changing, special effects not adjusted).

Perhaps I'll actually bother to get past the first act if this is official. :)

Regards,
SB
 
hm... I think I left off at Act II on my second run. I have to start over, don't I? No biggie (considering all the changes). Heck that was last August I last played it anyway. :p

Any other mods I should look at? Are they stackable?
 
So I've just started The Witcher 2. Naturally, with my Ryzen 5950X + 6900XT into my LG 48" CX OLED, I set the game to maximum everything at 3840x2160.

So, first off, the game didn't start. The launcher initiates the game, but it just hangs. At first I thought the game was hanging because it was failing to load my The Witcher game saves from my One Drive documents folder.

Nope. I have too many CPU threads available!

Code:
chdir C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam
start /affinity 255 Steam.exe


Eventually I found the solution, which is to use the above command lines to limit the game to run on 4-cores/8-threads. I can't find a way to add a command line startup to the game itself in Steam, so instead I'm running Steam with limited affinity. That way, when Steam starts The Witcher 2, the game inherits the affinity from Steam.

So, the game is working and I start the tutorial. And I'm getting about 60fps instead of the 120fps my monitor is capped at and the graphics card fan starts roaring and my overlay shows 311W power consumption. Huh? Why is this 10 year old game doing that?

Ubersampling...

I can't find a good answer as to what Ubersampling actually is. It's compared with supersampling, but ... er I dunno.

Is The Witcher 2's Ubersampling one of those modern mysteries that will never get solved?
 
Is The Witcher 2's Ubersampling one of those modern mysteries that will never get solved?

It's very long time ago but IIRC it's something like rendering the same frame multiple times with small offsets to create a better AA result.
 
So I've just started The Witcher 2. Naturally, with my Ryzen 5950X + 6900XT into my LG 48" CX OLED, I set the game to maximum everything at 3840x2160.

So, first off, the game didn't start. The launcher initiates the game, but it just hangs. At first I thought the game was hanging because it was failing to load my The Witcher game saves from my One Drive documents folder.

Nope. I have too many CPU threads available!

Code:
chdir C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam
start /affinity 255 Steam.exe


Eventually I found the solution, which is to use the above command lines to limit the game to run on 4-cores/8-threads. I can't find a way to add a command line startup to the game itself in Steam, so instead I'm running Steam with limited affinity. That way, when Steam starts The Witcher 2, the game inherits the affinity from Steam.

So, the game is working and I start the tutorial. And I'm getting about 60fps instead of the 120fps my monitor is capped at and the graphics card fan starts roaring and my overlay shows 311W power consumption. Huh? Why is this 10 year old game doing that?

Ubersampling...

I can't find a good answer as to what Ubersampling actually is. It's compared with supersampling, but ... er I dunno.

Is The Witcher 2's Ubersampling one of those modern mysteries that will never get solved?


DF made a video on W2 on modern hardware a while ago, and yeah some settings are still "killing" recent gpus.
 
It's very long time ago but IIRC it's something like rendering the same frame multiple times with small offsets to create a better AA result.
In the Digital Foundry video, Alex says it uses 2x2 ordered-grid supersampling. It seems he spoke with the developers regarding other topics for the video, so that seems likely to be an authoritative description (he doesn't say as much, though).


I haven't tried playing with the AA options to decide whether I want to continue gameplay with Ubersampling. I suspect Freesync isn't going to make varying-around 60fps framerates a pleasant experience, being used to 120fps.

I notice in the video that Alex forces driver AF and that Ubersampling improves the quality of distant textures (he calls out the latter explicitly).

Now I'm wondering about trying forced supersampling in the game by using Virtual Super Resolution, just to see if that is better or worse.

library -- right click on game -- manage -- general -- launch options
In the case of The Witcher 2, there is no "Launch options" item on that menu.
 
So I've just started The Witcher 2. Naturally, with my Ryzen 5950X + 6900XT into my LG 48" CX OLED, I set the game to maximum everything at 3840x2160.

So, the game is working and I start the tutorial. And I'm getting about 60fps instead of the 120fps my monitor is capped at and the graphics card fan starts roaring and my overlay shows 311W power consumption. Huh? Why is this 10 year old game doing that?
I went through similar performance issues with Witcher 2 and my 5700 XT last year. I found the recommendation to add the DXVK d3d-dlls to the bin directory and this made a world of difference for me in this game. DXVK is "A Vulkan-based translation layer for Direct3D 9/10/11 which allows running 3D applications on Linux using Wine." but it works fine in Windows as well. Just download the latest release from GitHub and copy the dlls to the Witcher 2 bin directory and make sure Steam doesn't auto update and you should notice a significant performance improvement even with Ubersampling enabled.
 
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