The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt revealed

[Silent_Buddha]

Oh my F-ing lord. This is a really really fucked up console port. You can't even fully rebind keys. I can't configure it for RDFG movement instead of WASD (which is really painful to use for me due to an injury suffered decades ago).

It's fucking hard coded. OMG, I'm sooooo very pissed off right now.

Regards,
SB

 

[Ethatron]

I love it, played an hour. Combat is much more fluid than in 2. Combat reminds me of some game I played, but can't lay the finger on it.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Combat reminds me of some game I played, but can't lay the finger on it.

Pacman?

 

[lanek]

The hair ... well it react on movement,, but why the hairs are so bad modelized... here lies the problem with it, im sure the code is good, but it look like a cartoon modelisation. seriously, if they have use tesselation on the strands, i will want to see where is the millions of strands.

 

[Daozang]

I'm in the village right after the first time they see the flying monster, can't remember its name.
Now I wish I didn't have to go to work tomorrow...
Performance wise, the game gives me a constant 60 with vsync on.
Most settings on ultra with two or three on high @1440p.
Haven't done much tweaking to be honest, and mostly discarded everything nvidia's gf experience recommended.
One of the those, was the hair physics, which I turned on. No noticeable difference in frame rate...
Will give more impressions tomorrow.
But this is a beautiful game!
And I was wrong, it is not that saturated as I thought, or at least a lot less than the videos seemed to be.

 

[pharma]

i will want to see where is the millions of strands.

Unfortunately, Hubby was exaggerating .... it's only tens of thousands. ;-)

For more info and demo on Witcher HairWorks you can go here ....

http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/gu...uide#the-witcher-3-wild-hunt-nvidia-hairworks

The solution? NVIDIA HairWorks, which adds tens of thousands of DirectX 11, tessellated hair strands to characters, each reacting realistically to movement and external forces. In addition, the use of individual hairs and layers enables dynamic lighting to permeate throughout each strand and layer, for hairs to be accurately shadowed, and for deeper layers to be self-shadowed by other hairs, improving image quality further still.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Well, after hacking around in various .ini files, I finally figured out a way to change keyboard settings for keys they don't allow you to rebind. OMG, it's a royal PITA. And you can't change them directly. You have to change the default values. And then in game reset to default for the custom settings to take effect. WTF. Why not just let us rebind the frigging keys?

Regards,
SB

 

[gamervivek]

Isn't there a slider in the AMD control panel to turn down tessellation levels? Will this not work for Hairworks?

It it does, it'd be interesting to see how much different the hair looks.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

So, it looks like at least for humans, Nvidia Hairworks has a similar level of quality to TressFX, only at a significantly higher cost. I'm sure it must be technically better, but I'm not seeing it so far.

Regards,
SB

 

[MfA]

Well, after hacking around in various .ini files, I finally figured out a way to change keyboard settings for keys they don't allow you to rebind. OMG, it's a royal PITA. And you can't change them directly. You have to change the default values. And then in game reset to default for the custom settings to take effect. WTF. Why not just let us rebind the frigging keys?

They fucked up remapping with Witcher 2 too ... but hey, at least they don't have a couple hard coded working completely outside the remapping layer. Could be worse.

 

[swaaye]

Isn't there a slider in the AMD control panel to turn down tessellation levels? Will this not work for Hairworks?

If I remember right, the slider has never done anything. It works on an application specific basis and I don't think they've ever implemented anything.

Well, after hacking around in various .ini files, I finally figured out a way to change keyboard settings for keys they don't allow you to rebind. OMG, it's a royal PITA. And you can't change them directly. You have to change the default values. And then in game reset to default for the custom settings to take effect. WTF. Why not just let us rebind the frigging keys?

Yeah that's not exactly a good sign of taking the port really seriously.

 

[psorcerer]

Performance wise, the game gives me a constant 60 with vsync on.

I would like to see a graph of frame-times for the "constant 60" you are referring to. Just for the sake of curiosity.

 

[MfA]

So, it looks like at least for humans, Nvidia Hairworks has a similar level of quality to TressFX, only at a significantly higher cost. I'm sure it must be technically better, but I'm not seeing it so far.

I think the main problem for AMD is the use of geometry shaders rather than the small tris ... they intentionally avoided it with TressFX and I think NVIDIA quite incidentally didn't. At source code level it probably wouldn't be too much work to convert it to the TressFX way, at shader level unfortunately it would.

 

[Daozang]

I would like to see a graph of frame-times for the "constant 60" you are referring to. Just for the sake of curiosity.

Sure, though I'm not sure how to do that
Fraps never showed anything bellow 59 and above 61.
When I get back home, I'll check how it runs with vsync off, for starters.
Then with everything on ultra, except AA, (I can't remember what kind it supports), I'm sure I have something enabled...
My guess is there is no benchmark in the game right?

 

[pjbliverpool]

Sure, though I'm not sure how to do that
Fraps never showed anything bellow 59 and above 61.
When I get back home, I'll check how it runs with vsync off, for starters.
Then with everything on ultra, except AA, (I can't remember what kind it supports), I'm sure I have something enabled...
My guess is there is no benchmark in the game right?

Record a benchmark with FRAPS which will give you an Excel sheet with all the frame times. Then download FRAFS and run that. It will give you a window into which you drag and drop the FRAPS benchmark Excel sheet which automatically converts it into a graph. Then simply screenshot and post.

 

[NThibieroz]

So, it looks like at least for humans, Nvidia Hairworks has a similar level of quality to TressFX, only at a significantly higher cost. I'm sure it must be technically better, but I'm not seeing it so far.SB

Why would you assume Hairworks is "technically superior" to TressFX? The main quality issue about Hairworks is the lack of an OIT solution and this shows quite badly (including on edges).

I think the main problem for AMD is the use of geometry shaders rather than the small tris ... they intentionally avoided it with TressFX and I think NVIDIA quite incidentally didn't.

Indeed the two approaches are significantly different. TressFX uses neither tessellation nor Geometry Shader whereas Hairworks use both. Neither are needed from a quality perspective, in fact they're both detrimental to performance (especially when combined together which is what Hairworks does). TressFX uses a fixed number of vertices per hair strand (from 8 to 64), and it's possible to add interpolated vertices if more curvature is needed (we haven't seen a need for this so far). The expansion between line segments to front facing polygons is done with a pure VS solution in TressFX.
Here is a link to a presentation providing more details on the inefficiency of tessellation+GS for hair rendering.

 

[Daozang]

Record a benchmark with FRAPS which will give you an Excel sheet with all the frame times. Then download FRAFS and run that. It will give you a window into which you drag and drop the FRAPS benchmark Excel sheet which automatically converts it into a graph. Then simply screenshot and post.

Can I do that with the free version of FRAPS?

Edit.
From what I read, it can record a 30 second clip.
If it is enough for a bench, I'll do it and post the results!

 

[pharma]

Why would you assume Hairworks is "technically superior" to TressFX? The main quality issue about Hairworks is the lack of an OIT solution and this shows quite badly (including on edges).

Your presentation link is probably based on old HairWorks tech.

In previous HairWorks-enhanced games, hair aliasing was sometimes visible when players used post-process anti-aliasing or low levels of hardware anti-aliasing. Now, we apply Multisample Anti-Aliasing (MSAA) by default directly to HairWorks hairs, ensuring high-quality, aliasing-free hair regardless of the player's general anti-aliasing settings. This new feature debuts in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and will be available to other GameWorks users in the near future via a free update on NVIDIA's Dev Zone.

With wind, water, and spell interaction, in addition to accurate shading, shadowing and animation, and the application of MSAA, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt's NVIDIA HairWorks integration delivers the most realistic and immersive hair and fur seen to date in a playable game, significantly bolstering the game's graphical fidelity.

http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/gu...uide#the-witcher-3-wild-hunt-nvidia-hairworks

 

[Malo]

Won't that make the performance gap even larger?

 

[pjbliverpool]

Can I do that with the free version of FRAPS?

Edit.
From what I read, it can record a 30 second clip.
If it is enough for a bench, I'll do it and post the results!

It's not an actual video clip you need to record, just a benchmark, i.e. it records all your frame rate information to an Excel file as you play. As far as I'm aware there is no time limit on that in the free version of FRAPS. I think the benchmark key deafult is F11.