Witcher 3 PC specs announced!

[Carfax83]

Fresh off the press. Looks like it will be a big game at 40GB, and require a fair amount of CPU power and RAM.. And there is a large discrepancy between AMD and NVidia for recommended GPU. The R9 290 is a significantly faster card than the GTX 770.

This makes me think the engine may support deferred context rendering, which only NVidia supports in their drivers. This could give them a performance advantage by allowing NVidia GPUs to be less CPU bound than their AMD counterparts.

Minimum System Requirements

• Intel CPU Core i5-2500K 3.3GHz
• AMD CPU Phenom II X4 940
• Nvidia GPU GeForce GTX 660
• AMD GPU Radeon HD 7870
• RAM 6GB
• OS 64-bit Windows 7 or 64-bit Windows 8 (8.1)
• DirectX 11
• HDD Space 40 GB

Recommended System Requirements

• Intel CPU Core i7 3770 3,4 GHz
• AMD CPU AMD FX-8350 4 GHz
• Nvidia GPU GeForce GTX 770
• AMD GPU Radeon R9 290
• RAM 8GB
• OS 64-bit Windows 7 or 64-bit Windows 8 (8.1)
• DirectX 11
• HDD Space 40 GB

Source

 

[Red Hawk]

Well the minimum looks more reasonable than ACU did for a game that's been developed for current consoles. Heftier recommended requirements than DAI.

We'll see about the uneven AMD/Nvidia cards under recommended. If it does come from making the game less CPU bound, would that matter for a CPU like the 3770? I would expect that to more affect the minimum requirements. Official minimum/recommended requirements can sometimes be wonky by comparison (A Radeon HD 4870 should not have been the AMD minimum in DAI if the 8800 GT was good enough for Nvidia). But in any case, this would indicate that they're targeting a higher max level of detail than Dragon Age Inquisition did, and I trust CD Projekt Red to make good on a decently optimized game that lives up to those requirements more than Ubisoft, for sure.

I'm not a Witcher fan but I always like to see developers pushing the limits of PC technology past what's capable of consoles. With Inquisition, the improvements over consoles were marginal -- there was better depth of field, better ambient occlusion, better tessellation, larger address space for textures, etc., but it all boiled down to "Everything the consoles do, but better". I'm excited to see a Eurogamer comparison and find out if TW3 on PC does stuff that consoles plain can't do.

 

[Carfax83]

We'll see about the uneven AMD/Nvidia cards under recommended. If it does come from making the game less CPU bound, would that matter for a CPU like the 3770? I would expect that to more affect the minimum requirements.

The GTX 660 is a slower card than the 7870 on average as well, but not to the extent of the GTX 770 and R9 290..

As to your question about the CPU, it's kind of tricky. Deferred context rendering isn't like Mantle, it doesn't really reduce overhead. Actually it can even increase it in some scenarios. But it does enable the CPU to send more draw calls in parallel to the GPU..

This can take a lot of CPU resources though, so well threaded CPUs like the Core i7 typically fare the best with this sort of workload.

So what might happen is that the GTX 770 being less CPU bound will be working at close to full capacity, whilst the R9 290 is only getting about 75 or 80% of it's performance.

This can make them much more even. The R9 290 should still blow past the GTX 770 in full GPU bound situations though..

With Inquisition, the improvements over consoles were marginal -- there was better depth of field, better ambient occlusion, better tessellation, larger address space for textures, etc., but it all boiled down to "Everything the consoles do, but better". I'm excited to see a Eurogamer comparison and find out if TW3 on PC does stuff that consoles plain can't do.

I thought DAI on PC had better textures as well, plus nicer looking shadows..

 

[Mem]

Also nice to see 32 bit OS being phased out for gaming by a few developers,no point using 32 bit OS nowadays for new games.

 

[Mem]

The GTX 660 is a slower card than the 7870 on average as well, but not to the extent of the GTX 770 and R9 290..

As to your question about the CPU, it's kind of tricky. Deferred context rendering isn't like Mantle, it doesn't really reduce overhead. Actually it can even increase it in some scenarios. But it does enable the CPU to send more draw calls in parallel to the GPU..

This can take a lot of CPU resources though, so well threaded CPUs like the Core i7 typically fare the best with this sort of workload.

So what might happen is that the GTX 770 being less CPU bound will be working at close to full capacity, whilst the R9 290 is only getting about 75 or 80% of it's performance.

This can make them much more even. The R9 290 should still blow past the GTX 770 in full GPU bound situations though..

I thought DAI on PC had better textures as well, plus nicer looking shadows..

Also be interesting to see how much video ram Witcher 3 needs in gaming.

 

[Carfax83]

Also nice to see 32 bit OS being phased out for gaming by a few developers,no point using 32 bit OS nowadays for new games.

Yep, 32 bit is finally on life support....for PC games I mean..

The Witcher 3 could likely still be made playable for 32 bit systems, but it would require a lot more loading screens which would be against the developer's intent..

 

[tential]

The game does use Gameworks so may be better suited to Nvidia cards at launch.

We all know though that after a couple of driver optimizations it can be anyone's game.
I really hope follow up GPU reviews become more normaly because I probably won't pick this game up at launch.

 

[Red Hawk]

The GTX 660 is a slower card than the 7870 on average as well, but not to the extent of the GTX 770 and R9 290..

The GTX 660 (non-Ti) is a bit slower than the 7870, but not by too much. Pitcairn and GK106 are basically on the same "tier" of graphics capability, competing with each other, while Hawaii is supposed to be a tier above GK104, meant to compete with GK110.

In any case,we'll just have to wait for the benchmarks to see if the difference in recommended specs is justified.

I thought DAI on PC had better textures as well, plus nicer looking shadows..

Shadows were better, yes. Eurogamer's analysis found the PC version to have a few better environmental textures here and there, but character textures were pretty much identical between PC, PS4, and Xbone.

 

[Carfax83]

The game does use Gameworks so may be better suited to Nvidia cards at launch.

We all know though that after a couple of driver optimizations it can be anyone's game.
I really hope follow up GPU reviews become more normaly because I probably won't pick this game up at launch.

If the game does use deferred context rendering, driver optimizations won't be able to overcome that deficit unless AMD starts supporting it in their drivers. But this remains to be seen.

The good thing about the Witcher 3 is that it will use PhysX 3.3, which runs very well on the CPU. So AMD users won't have any problems there. It will use terrain tessellation though, and apparently lots of it.

 

[Red Hawk]

If the game does use deferred context rendering, driver optimizations won't be able to overcome that deficit unless AMD starts supporting it in their drivers. But this remains to be seen.

The good thing about the Witcher 3 is that it will use PhysX 3.3, which runs very well on the CPU. So AMD users won't have any problems there. It will use terrain tessellation though, and apparently lots of it.

Hmm, so are you saying that if you have a good CPU, you'll be able to run full PhysX effects to match Nvidia GPU accelerated PhysX in detail without a monstrous performance hit? That's awesome, if true.

GCN cards aren't nearly as handicapped at tessellation as AMD's older DX11 cards were, so I wouldn't get too worried about that. It'll only be worth noting if it causes Tonga to have a significant advantage over Tahiti, since they have the same amount of shading power but Tonga has twice the geometry throughput.

 

[escrow4]

Disappointed. You'd think they would target hexa-cores by now. The CPU requirements are copy pasted from Mordor (and why are they stuck on IVB, they couldn't slap in some Haswell FMA3 and AVX2 support?) although if a 770 is recommended at least they should be optimising around Kepler. From memory Witcher 2 had a fat old Day 1 patch that improved everything. Meh really.

 

[Kelvrick]

Good thing I went for the i7 4790 instead of the i5 4690. I hope my 7950 can keep up. Might need to lower the resolution or details on my 1440 monitor though.

 

[Red Hawk]

Disappointed. You'd think they would target hexa-cores by now. The CPU requirements are copy pasted from Mordor (and why are they stuck on IVB, they couldn't slap in some Haswell FMA3 and AVX2 support?) although if a 770 is recommended at least they should be optimising around Kepler. From memory Witcher 2 had a fat old Day 1 patch that improved everything. Meh really.

Well how would going hexacore benefit the game enough to make it worth coding for? And the fact that an Ivy Bridge CPU is cited doesn't mean the game won't make use of FMA3 and AVX2, it just means that even without those instruction sets, a 3770 will be fine.

 

[skipsneeky2]

I wonder where a 970 will stand compared to a 290.Or for that matter a 290x. More times then not the recommended are just that and you could end up needing quite a bit more for the best experience.

 

[Carfax83]

Hmm, so are you saying that if you have a good CPU, you'll be able to run full PhysX effects to match Nvidia GPU accelerated PhysX in detail without a monstrous performance hit? That's awesome, if true.

To an extent, yes. PhysX 3.3 is exceptionally well optimized for the CPU, and has some nice destruction, particle and cloth physics.

Heavy effects like turbulence and fluid simulation will likely always run faster on the GPU though because the GPU has so much more raw power than a CPU..

But I don't know if Witcher 3 will use those advanced PhysX features. I know for sure it will use the destruction, particle and cloth effects though.

If you ever play Metro Last Light Redux, you can get a solid preview of PhysX 3.3. I was genuinely surprised at how well optimized PhysX 3.3 was in Metro LLR, compared to previous PhysX games.

There were no slowdowns running the game with Advanced PhysX turned on using the CPU; at least on my rig. Weaker CPUs though may have a problem..

GCN cards aren't nearly as handicapped at tessellation as AMD's older DX11 cards were, so I wouldn't get too worried about that. It'll only be worth noting if it causes Tonga to have a significant advantage over Tahiti, since they have the same amount of shading power but Tonga has twice the geometry throughput.

Yeah, GCN aren't weak at tessellation by any means, but they do have a larger performance hit when it's turned on than NVidia cards. The more tessellation, the greater the hit.

 

[Carfax83]

Disappointed. You'd think they would target hexa-cores by now. The CPU requirements are copy pasted from Mordor (and why are they stuck on IVB, they couldn't slap in some Haswell FMA3 and AVX2 support?) although if a 770 is recommended at least they should be optimising around Kepler. From memory Witcher 2 had a fat old Day 1 patch that improved everything. Meh really.

It's highly unlikely that games are going to be supporting AVX2 anytime soon, unless they are PC only titles.

Consoles only have AVX support after all, and it usually takes a long time before new instruction sets are supported by developers.

 

[escrow4]

It's highly unlikely that games are going to be supporting AVX2 anytime soon, unless they are PC only titles.

Consoles only have AVX support after all, and it usually takes a long time before new instruction sets are supported by developers.

Precisely why this should have stayed PC exclusive. No 2 was cut back (smaller linear level chunks, less Acts) for consoles and I'm not holding my breath for this.

 

[Red Hawk]

Precisely why this should have stayed PC exclusive. No 2 was cut back (smaller linear level chunks, less Acts) for consoles and I'm not holding my breath for this.

The game would probably not be getting made, or at least not be ambitious as it is, if they weren't justifying the cost by putting it on consoles.

 

[StinkyPinky]

I wonder how an overclocked 280X will perform. When are the new AMD GPU's coming out?

 

[RussianSensation]

Yeah, GCN aren't weak at tessellation by any means

Yes, they are. The newer 285 destroys the flagship 290X by 69%, while 980 is 2.75-3X faster (32X-64X tessellation factor) than a 290X at tessellation. It's so bad that a 760 is faster than every card outside of 285 that AMD makes. AMD barely improved tessellation performance when moving from Tahiti XT to Hawaii. If a game uses a lot of tessellation, it's going to level current generation of GCN cards. Outside of AMD's 285, their tessellation level is barely at Fermi GTX580 level.

Considering this will be a GW title, expect to see 50-100% performance hit with MSAA on, and pretty much no chance that R9 200 series and below will be faster than NV's cards.

What makes it tricky is determining what it means to "max out Witcher 3". Does it mean 4xMSAA, 8xMSAA or SSAA/Ubersampling?

http://www.dsogaming.com/news/rumor...ne-gtx780-ti-pushes-35-45fps-at-max-settings/

"According to Gametech, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is a very demanding title; a title that a single GTX 780Ti struggles to run when higher levels of AA are enabled. As the Russian gaming website noted, the PC version runs currently with all its bells and whistles enabled (plus 8xMSAA) with 35-45fps on a GTX 780Ti at 1080p. Naturally, a single 780Ti is able to hit the 60fps sweet spot in its current form provided MSAA is lowered."

If the above is true, it's looking pretty reasonable. Given that Witcher 3 launches at the end of May, it's possible R9 300 and GM200 series will be out which should ensure the game is maxed out at 60 fps with 4xMSAA at 1080P. As expected 1440P and above users will need SLI/CF.

---

"Aside from this, the website motoring crunch revealed that the Witcher 3 will run at 720p at 30FPS on the Xbox One and 900p at 30FPS on the PS4.

Cyberland also stated that if the PS4/Xbox One versions of Witcher 3 are compared to the PC version of the game, the console versions are on the "low" version of graphics settings which puts it roughly at the level of Witcher 2 [PC] graphics."
http://www.kdramastars.com/articles/36517/20140910/witcher-3-pc-system-requirements.htm

Makes sense considering 780Ti is ~2.3X faster than a 7850. If I were upgrading now for Witcher 3, I'd choose NV, but my advice as always is to wait until the game is released as it's still 5 months away.

As for CPU/RAM requirements, those are probably BS. What game runs faster/better with 8GB of RAM vs. 6GB? I can't think of any. As far as 2500K goes as a minimum requirement, I am pretty sure an i5 2500K @ 4.7Ghz will be more than enough to run into a GPU bottleneck for any single chip card. It's obvious they put no thinking into CPU recommendations as an i5 2500K and an X4 940 are not even remotely close in performance. Even for Witcher 2, Nehalem/Lynnfield i5/i7 were significantly faster than AMD's Phenom chips.

I would expect SB to be 45-60% faster than Phenom IIs in Witcher 3. I also don't see a 9370/9590 competing well against i7 4690/4790K.

 

[Artorias]

I wonder how an overclocked 280X will perform. When are the new AMD GPU's coming out?

Yeah I wonder how an i72600k3.4/R9280x will run this game. My OC XFX edition is doing much better than I had expected compared to stock.

Hoping I can set everything to max at 1080p, no ubersampling, maybe no AA or MSAA2x for 50fps?

 

[Red Hawk]

Yes, they are. The newer 285 destroys the flagship 290X by 69%, while 980 is 2.75-3X faster (32X-64X tessellation factor) than a 290X at tessellation. It's so bad that a 760 is faster than every card outside of 285 that AMD makes. AMD barely improved tessellation performance when moving from Tahiti XT to Hawaii. If a game uses a lot of tessellation, it's going to level current generation of GCN cards. Outside of AMD's 285, their tessellation level is barely at Fermi GTX580 level.

I think there was a bug in how Tessmark ran on AMD cards when the 290 came out and had benchmarks run on it. Hawaii has the same geometry front end as Tonga; it should have just as large an advantage over Tahiti as Tonga does, but it doesn't. I heard somewhere that Tessmark uses OpenGL and for a while, AMD's OpenGL drivers didn't enable usage of the multiple geometry engines in GCN cards.

Past that, I don't think there's a single game that has shown that severe a performance difference in tessellation between Kepler/Maxwell and GCN. Even in Metro Last Light, which has pretty extensive use of tessellation, AMD and Nvidia go back and forth on depending on the chip.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/GPU14/852

Tessellation is not just about theoretical primitive drawing ability. There's hull and domain shading, which causes a shader bottleneck. And AMD uses a number of techniques for improving tessellation performance, such as off-chip buffering, that would make a difference in real-world gaming but might not necessarily show up in a theoretical benchmark.

 

[Aikouka]

"According to Gametech, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is a very demanding title; a title that a single GTX 780Ti struggles to run when higher levels of AA are enabled. As the Russian gaming website noted, the PC version runs currently with all its bells and whistles enabled (plus 8xMSAA) with 35-45fps on a GTX 780Ti at 1080p. Naturally, a single 780Ti is able to hit the 60fps sweet spot in its current form provided MSAA is lowered."

Makes me feel a little bit better at blowing all that money on the ROG Swift monitor. I've got a single 780 Ti, which means I'm at even more of a detriment by playing at 2560x1440 rather than 1920x1080.

 

[Red Hawk]

Makes me feel a little bit better at blowing all that money on the ROG Swift monitor. I've got a single 780 Ti, which means I'm at even more of a detriment by playing at 2560x1440 rather than 1920x1080.

That actually doesn't sound too harsh in comparison to Dragon Age Inquisition. A 780 Ti manages 51 FPS, and that's with 2x MSAA and not quite all the settings maxed out (the Ultra setting does not max out tessellation, post process effects like depth of field, and textures).

 

[Whitestar127]

Those CPU specs got me a bit puzzled. I'm actually wondering if there will be any significant difference in performance at 1080p between the 3770 and 2500, especially with an overclocked 2500. Will be interesting to see CPU benchmarks.

And what about the RAM; are we coming to a point in time where 16GB is now the new sweet-spot? Maybe it is already and I just haven't been keeping up to date?