All versions of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt have become available this evening. As players begin their long-awaited RPG adventure, some have hit the internet to share their initial impressions. That means we finally get to hear about how the PC version fares.
As suspected, the PC version of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is suffering from various issues. Many PC gamers are reporting that the game is crashing constantly. Altering game settings doesn't appear to fix the problem. The crashing doesn't occur at specific points in the game, allowing players to progress, albeit with the frustration of never knowing when the game will close.
A more common issue is low frame rate during cutscenes, or rather choppiness during camera transitions. This issue is breaking the immersion of many players, sadly. It doesn't seem to matter whether or not the cutscene occurs indoor or outdoor, pointing toward an issue with code rather than the game's beauty taxing hardware.
Optimization issues are present, too. Changes to foliage distance and shadow quality dramatically affect frame rate. Those without top-tier hardware are quickly having to lower those settings to experience frame rate stability. HairWorks is another setting that is having a tremendous impact on performance, particularly for those with AMD GPUs.
One interesting thing to note is that a new benchmark shows the GTX 970 beating the usually more powerful GTX 780 Ti Phantom by a significant margin. Recent AMD cards perform more admirably, pointing at an issue with Kepler cards. See for yourself:
Many of the bugs and issues with polish that have been experienced on PS4 and Xbox One have made the transition to PC, quests breaking, camera sensitivity, and audio overlap just to name a few.
I'm busy playing both the PS4 and Xbox One versions, and shared my impressions earlier today. The gist is that you should probably wait until a few patches are released to invest in this game.
There are many users who are having luck with their experience, capable of maxing out the game with AMD and Intel processors typically backed by R9 280+ or GTX 970+ graphics cards. If you're planning on playing The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt on PC this week, cross your fingers, and let us know how it goes.
For the time being, we'll just have to await word from CD Projekt Red about what it's doing to address known issues.
