The Witcher Gameplay and Performance @ [H]

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The Witcher Gameplay and Performance - The Polish action role-playing game The Witcher shipped this season to tumultuous applause and generally positive reviews, heralded by some as the first "true RPG" in a long time. We've taken the time to find what kind of gameplay experience is possible with 4 of today's hottest video cards!

The Witcher is something new and different. We've seen a lot of western RPGs, and we've seen a lot of Japanese RPGs, but The Witcher is decidedly different than any kind of RPG we've seen before. It offers some truly fresh and unique experiences, and it won't cost you an arm and a leg to play it. We would recommend at least a NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512 MB video card if Aliasing is a big problem for you or if you have a large widescreen display. Otherwise, the very inexpensive ATI Radeon HD 3850 256 MB is more than capable of giving you a fantastic gameplay experience.
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Very astute review. Thanks for throwing some attention at a very approachable and unique (if admittedly adult) RPG. For what it's worth, it runs great on my sig-setup as well. the 7800GT handles it gracefully at respectable resolutions.
 
Great review. I have yet to try this game, but I've read so many good things about it, that I'm sure it will be inevitable for me, to try it out eventually.

I would like to make a suggestion though. Given that this is greatly focused on the game itself and what it has to offer, can you start including more screeshots of the areas you visited ?
Right now, there are very few of them. These would just be used to show off the game (no comparisons), so there's no need to use PNGs. JPGs will be fine and your bandwidth won't be killed.
 
I really liked the review and Brents take on it.Great to see this excellent title get more attention,as its well earned and deserved.Anyone that likes a refined CRPG should buy a copy,preferably the Euro or Brit version,and get playing.I am on my third trip through the game now !

Its much more polished then Oblivion,in many ways.I hope to see more adult themed titles like this arrive on the PC soon,and over the years to come,without the censorship from North American publishers.I bought my copy online for 45,plus 16 dollars shipping from a European site.
 
I bought this game (the UK uncensored version from www.GoGamer.com) like a month and a half ago and haven't had a chance to really play it yet. This great review makes me want to play it even more now. Thanks for the great article on it!
 
So where is the pics of these "[H]uge-breasted [H]arlots"? Is it playable on my system below, Its not another Vista only game is it?
 
Silus said:
Great review. I have yet to try this game, but I've read so many good things about it, that I'm sure it will be inevitable for me, to try it out eventually.

I would like to make a suggestion though. Given that this is greatly focused on the game itself and what it has to offer, can you start including more screeshots of the areas you visited ?
Right now, there are very few of them. These would just be used to show off the game (no comparisons), so there's no need to use PNGs. JPGs will be fine and your bandwidth won't be killed.
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As we are mostly interested in the hardware support and performance aspect of the game, we did not find it to be fitting to the format to supply a plethora of screenshots of the game's scenery. Such imagesare more appropriately found on game review sites like Shacknews or GameSpot.
 
Mark_Warner said:
As we are mostly interested in the hardware support and performance aspect of the game, we did not find it to be fitting to the format to supply a plethora of screenshots of the game's scenery. Such imagesare more appropriately found on game review sites like Shacknews or GameSpot.
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I understand that, but this is focused on just this one game, so I think it would be adequate to include more screenshots, just to show off the game. It's just a suggestion though.
 
Game works fine in XP.

My wife's computer had the option for 4x AA in game with an x1900 AIW. I only had the 2x option with an 8800GT.
 
Dang, where have the great coop RPG's gone? This is yet another awesome single player RPG.
 
Good showing from the 3870. If only the card had the means to not always have to do MSAA resolve in the shaders...

These cards are a bit underrated if you ask me, but it's also no surprise that more people aren't buying them in droves.
 
phide said:
Good showing from the 3870. If only the card had the means to not always have to do MSAA resolve in the shaders...

These cards are a bit underrated if you ask me, but it's also no surprise that more people aren't buying them in droves.
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In my view, it's not underrated if it underperforms. And that is what it did here.
 
Oddly enough, I have a Geforce 8800GT and I have played the game through with 4xAA, but at a lower resolution (1280x960).
 
Mark_Warner said:
In my view, it's not underrated if it underperforms. And that is what it did here.
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I wasn't speaking strictly about performance, but, yes, performance-wise, the 3870 doesn't quite deliver the performance per dollar of the GT 512 if you were to buy today. From what I can tell, I'd have to say it's pretty close, though.

Doesn't make much sense to not make that $20-30 leap to the GT if you're looking at the 3870, unless, of course, you're looking to snag a pair of 'em.
 
Glad to see [H] give some attention to this game, its definetly the best RPG of the 2007 IMHO. In this game It all comes down to decisions and concequences, something a "RPG" like Oblivion never had. Really glad I snagged a 3870 and this game almost simultaneously and could enjoy its visual beauty to the max.

ps. This game need huge swap space, or atleast I got constant crashes with 1.2 patch and 2GB swap size on my XP setup. Switched the swap size to 4GB and the crashes were gone.
 
I tried the demo.. The game looks awesome, but definitely puts my paltry 1GB of memory to shame. I think I will wait until I get a new PC to buy it... Hopefully by then they will have a Collector's Edition out with a bunch of swag.. My friend got the game and was disappointed at the fact it didn't even include a map. But at least his new system plays the game wonderfully. *grumble*

It's not fair! He has a much better system and a 22" 1680x1050 monitor.. And I have an old system but a 25.5" 1920x1200 monitor.. Maybe I should have upgraded my PC before I made the leap to LCD. :eek: :D
 
Mmm.. The collectors edition for anywhere outside of poland actually sucks horribly and is somewhat typical of Atari's handling of any collectors edition game..

I have the game myself and it is really great :)
I run it on a 7600GT and its not bad atall :)
 
my 7900gt allowed aa (4x iirc) @ 1152x864 (again iirc, haven't played the game since last november). but most of the time, fps will drop to 25-30.
 
I'm still playing The Witcher and some of the towns are enormous. Running on a 7900 gt, I'm able to play it all on high except for depth of field at 1240*1080. It's a very fun game.
 
I used to play The Witcher + patch 1.1a with an X1800PE at 1280 res, everything maxed +2xAA.
Performance was a bit jerky when fighting multiple opponents but smooth otherwise.

With my 8800GT, I'm running 1920x1440 with everything maxed and its awesomely smooth even with around 10 attackers on screen!
This is with patch 1.2.
(I cant be asked to do a comparison with the 1.1a patch)

So thanks for a great review, you've dragged me right back into playing it again.
Fortunately the 1.2 patch has fixed the majority of the long load times.
The longest load is now 40 seconds, the fastest is 3 seconds, average about 20 seconds.
Previously, the longest load was over 1:30mins and quickest was 16 seconds, average about 45 seconds.
 
Thank you very much I was looking for performance test in Witcher for some time.
Since after upgrading from 17" to 24" 7600gt doesn't cut it anymore in this game :D

BTW it's also better to ignore patch 1.2 as there seems to be more problems with it than it solves unless someone is desperate for faster loading.

But going from 1 gig ram to 4 greatly helped with loading times (and from 3Ghz netburst to 3 ghz pentium e :D )

However I disagree about mature rating part of article:
The Witcher has earned its Mature rating, in every sense of the word. Adult themes penetrate every part of this game. There is the ubiquitous violence, without which, it seems, no modern adult-focused game could call itself complete, or even marketable. There is drug and alcohol use, and lots of it
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Written that way it seems like Witcher was made with that much brutality to appeal to lower instincts of us. That is not true as it was made to completly resemble the character of Witcher saga and stories by Sapkowski and it does it almost perfectly. And "almost" comes from the fact that even uncensored version of the game looks a bit "tonned down" compared to books.
It's dark and brutal world of fantasy not the happy happy hero saves the world of Tolkien, Eddings or Dragon Lance.

Altrough you will have to trust me on that as IIRC only one book so far was translated into English but hopefully more will follow soon after the success of game :D

And for those who are interested in stories from the world end - it's ultimate best seller in Poland - after few months it sold twice as much copies as HoMM V (previous record owner) did since it release and still sells extremly well.
 
As an American I despair for the lack of mature & sophisticated fare because neurotic mommies and daddies are terrified even restricted material will find and destroy their children. Publishers respond by self-censoring for reasons of profit more than morality. Meanwhile we quietly spent 20 billion (or some such) a year on hardcore porn. :rolleyes:
I havn't tried The Witcher but I look forward to doing so, the euro version in particular. Is the UK version completely uncensored?
 
Sate said:
Is the UK version completely uncensored?
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As best I can tell, yes. The US version just cuts what they had to cut to stay in an "M" rating though. So basically you get a couple of nude green skinned chicks running around in the wilderness and the "cards" you pick up for sleeping with women in the game don't always have their breasts covered. That's really about it.

The game isn't all that stressful on hardware aside from liking memory. It'll use over a gig, so you'll want 2GB to run it optimally. My 7900GTX runs it at 1920x1200 with everything on high. I think I have AA off but that hasn't bothered me. It also runs decently at 1440x900 on the Quadro NVS 110M (7300 chip) in my laptop, though I did have to turn a few things down to med & kill the shadows.

According to some people on a forum about the game, it'll actually run ok on a "fast" Athlon XP even though the box says it's "out of range". Of course, this isn't surprising since it "requires" a P4 2.4.
 
I love this game, just started Act III.

My 7800GT at 1600x1200 plays well with all max in game settings until I get into a lot of people when I first load into an area, once loaded I never experience much slowdown at all.

Great review and Great game
 
Thanks for this review. I'm a fan of this game, and I play at 4xAA, 16xAF and 1920x1080 res. The Trade Quarter made me put it down to 2xAA.

The vegetation is decent, I feel the sky and character models are exceptional.
 
Nice article, Mark Warner. I just started playing the game about 2 hours into it.. and still have not yet become fully immersed into it since I have so many other games to play at the same time (CoD4, ProStreet, TestDrive Unlimited, UT3, Crysis, etc... etc... etc....) it's crazy!

Well, here are some things that I discoverd.

1. Disabling Depth of Field does give me a few fps boost (unlike the article stating that it made zero performance difference). Even in regular gameplay, there was always a slight improvement in frame rates. It's on a 3870 card.

2. Vsync cannot be enabled with this game, from the card's driver panel, and due to the lack of vsync option in the game menu. Why? I think it's the aurora engine that has not properly implemented vsync but the devs certainly could do it. It's strange how there are so many problems with certain new games (esp. DX10 games) lately when it comes to "regular" graphic options that have been around for years. The only way for me to force Vsync on is to launch D3DOverrider (a program bundled with Rivatuner). There are severe hitches every 5-10 seconds, with triple buffering on. I havent tried it without triple buffering so I don't know if the hitches are due to lack of proper vsync support or due to triple buffering. If there's any way for me to avoid the HORRIBLE, DISILLUSIONING screen tearing (which looks awful with this kind of 3rd-person perspective), it would be greatly appreciated if the devs could release a patch that supports Vsync. For your info: Bioshock and HL2episode games automatically implement triple buffering if Vsync is enabled, which is impressive!

3. Patch 1.2 has greatly reduced memory usage from patch 1.1a!!! My 2 GB of memory was nearly maxed out all the time at 1.8 GB usage with 1.1a, but now only up to 1.3 or 1.4 GB of memory is being used at the most. I guess this goes hand-in-hand with greatly reduced load times (less than half as long as with patch 1.1a)!!! Maybe this huge buffer is part of reason why the devs decided to omit Vsync support from the beginning?


One request for the game play option: Please include a first-person perspective (like in Oblivion) as another viewing angle because I got tired of the O-T-S view and above-the-head views. Sometimes Geralt is just not my taste and I would just rather see the world from my own eyes.. LOL :p
 
Chapter 3 performance is HUGELY different to chapter 1&2 as reported by many people, so it is a shame the review did not test that area.

In Chapter 3 it is not uncommon to see performance drop to 20FPS @1280x1204 on a 8800GT standing on the street and raining (mainly outside on ST drops occur). In contrast Chapter 1&2 will run at around 40FPS+ in the worst times. The interesting thing is dropping IQ does not help, changing a C2D from 3.0gig to 3.3gig actually helps so it "appears" cpu bound.

I did not comprehend the performance drop of Chapter three reported by others until I hit it myself, I guess if you don't run fraps you may not notice the difference so much.
 
CapnBiggles said:
Very astute review. Thanks for throwing some attention at a very approachable and unique (if admittedly adult) RPG. For what it's worth, it runs great on my sig-setup as well. the 7800GT handles it gracefully at respectable resolutions.
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Adult in Europe, kiddy game in the US. Im not all 'YAY BOOBIES!', im just border line violently against any form of censorship.
 
Some have made a huge deal about the "sex" in the game and it's unwarranted. You have a choice to trigger an encounter or skip it, and if you choose to have them occur you will see a static card that may show frontal nudity. Not all cards show nudity. I have the import DVD version from GoGamer.

I could run the entire game on a single HD 3850. That was @ 1680x 16xAF. The swamp with rain and fog could drop FPS and never enough to hurt play.

The Trade Quarter will slow down any system on occasion. I found the Trade Quarter smoother on my lower clocked Agena rig than on my Q6600 G-0 with a much higher overclock for whatever the reason. The OC on my Q6600 is perfectly prime stable, so that isn't an issue. Both systems sport 4Gb ram and are running Vista x64. The other system has a 8800 GTX @ 661|2040 with a 1600 shader clock.
 
Nice Review, maybe I'll get it in for my b-day present in a few weeks.

Adult in Europe, kiddy game in the US. Im not all 'YAY BOOBIES!', im just border line violently against any form of censorship.
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I hate censorship too, but at least it's self-censorship. The only way to solve would be for the government to force wal-mart to sell the uncensored game, which would be a bit.. <a-hem>... fascist.
 
This game actually surprised me, i didnt expect much from it but it looks great and is a fun game.
 
"The outdoor scenery easily rivals, and in some ways surpasses, that found in Oblivion, the old gold standard for outdoor eye-candy. But The Witcher does it more efficiently."

That is just false. I'm not such of an Oblivion fanboy, and even though I believe that The Witcher has better gameplay than Oblivion, I still have my eyesight, you know.

The Witcher's graphics look dated and washed out compared to newer games, let alone Oblivion, which is one of the most beautiful Video game in recent years. This is not just wrong, it's biased. The Witcher has great and addicting gameplay, true. It's very very fun to play, true. But it's very far from any type of 'technology achievement' or 'graphical splendor' titles. It just doesn't look that good.

You don't have to worship every little thing in a game in order to appreciate it.
 
Oh please it does not necessarily mean how much "latest technology" it uses. Graphics can simply mean how realistic it looks and how visually attractive it is.

The ground textures in Oblivion looks awful, period. That's why there are so many texture packs to download, to fix that awful thing. Also the swaying grass looks just like Crysis settings on Medium or Low.

The Witcher does not over-use bloom/HDR lighting like in Oblivion. The colors might be a little washed-out in the darker levels and I do not like that either, but what really ruins it is the insanely bright glare found on people's faces in Oblivion when light is shining on them (you could even see "rays" glowing from their faces... oh please!).
 
Bo_Fox said:
Oh please it does not necessarily mean how much "latest technology" it uses. Graphics can simply mean how realistic it looks and how visually attractive it is.

The ground textures in Oblivion looks awful, period. That's why there are so many texture packs to download, to fix that awful thing. Also the swaying grass looks just like Crysis settings on Medium or Low.

The Witcher does not over-use bloom/HDR lighting like in Oblivion. The colors might be a little washed-out in the darker levels and I do not like that either, but what really ruins it is the insanely bright glare found on people's faces in Oblivion when light is shining on them (you could even see "rays" glowing from their faces... oh please!).
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very good :)

i really suck at this game but fuck its fun :)
 
Bo_Fox said:
Oh please it does not necessarily mean how much "latest technology" it uses. Graphics can simply mean how realistic it looks and how visually attractive it is.

The ground textures in Oblivion looks awful, period. That's why there are so many texture packs to download, to fix that awful thing. Also the swaying grass looks just like Crysis settings on Medium or Low.

The Witcher does not over-use bloom/HDR lighting like in Oblivion. The colors might be a little washed-out in the darker levels and I do not like that either, but what really ruins it is the insanely bright glare found on people's faces in Oblivion when light is shining on them (you could even see "rays" glowing from their faces... oh please!).
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I agree the witcher looks much better than oblivion. I really cant stand how oblivion overused the hell out of bloom/HDR it looks like shit. The shadows in oblivion are just as bad nothing like talking to someone and seeing the glows of light jumping off thier face while half of it is coverd in blocky shadows that seem to jump and jitter randomly. The water in oblivion looked terrible too.

Oblivion looks damn good if your just looking around at the scenery but when you go to get a better look alot of things just look bad.
 
HEY GUYS, just tried it for the first time with an 8800GTX all night last night.

On that new 8800GTX I just bought, it runs great at 4x AA 1920x1200 in most levels, with a minimum of well above 30 fps in most areas. Make sure transparency AA is turned off or it will bring down the frame rates to like 20 fps average in some outdoor levels. When entering Chapter 3, you could just temporarily disable AA--and seeing how the game is 50-60 hours long, it might only need to be disabled a few times throughout the game (not really sure how many times, though).

The in-game setting still only allows me to select up to 2x AA. So, Mark Warner's assumption that 768MB of detected video memory would allow 4x AA to be selectable from the game menu unfortunately did not do it. But no worries here--just go to Nvidia's driver CP and select 4x AA (make sure "enhance application setting" is NOT selected).

What I like about Nvidia the best over ATI is that I can force Vsync and Triple Buffering (via D3DOverrider, bundled with Rivatuner) without experiencing any stuttering problems like on Radeon 38xx cards!!! Couldn't stand vsync tearing, but the game refused to run smoothly with vsync on that 3800 card. Now it runs beautifully and perfectly on my new 8800GTX. :):):)
 
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