The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt: PC Performance Benchmarks for Graphics Cards and Processors 2015

BASIC INFORMATION ON THE GAME

   

Released : May 19, 2015
Genre : RPG / 3D / 3rd Person
Developer : CD Projekt RED and CD Projekt RED Krakó
Publisher : Namco Bandai Games

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is a new generation role-playing game set in an amazing fantasy world where you have to make difficult decisions and be responsible for their consequences. The world is engulfed in war. The army of the Nilfgaard empire erases everything in its path, trying to get to the very heart of the Northern Kingdoms. Driven by deeply personal motives, the famous witcher, Geralt of Rivia, will stop at nothing to find and protect a certain person spoken of in an ancient prophecy. Meanwhile, an enemy that knows no fear and pity follows him, the most unimaginable nightmare - the Wild Hunt, a cavalcade of ghostly horsemen, harbingers of doom and death, capable of leaving no trace of entire settlements in just one night ...

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt offers a non-linear, mature, action-packed story and an unparalleled non-QTE combat system that combines a wide range of RPG tactical elements with fast-paced and spectacular combat worthy of the best action games.

THE GRAFICAL PART

In this subsection of our review, the main graphical aspects of this game are revealed. Particular attention is paid to the version of the graphics engine used, the version of the API used, graphics settings and the quality of the development of the main visual aspects.

Supported OS and graphics API

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is supported on major Windows operating systems, which include Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8. Other operating systems are not currently supported by the developers and will not be supported. 

 

The priority and primary graphics API for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is DirectX 11 .  

Game engine

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was developed on the REDengine 3 game engine, which was aimed at current generation consoles and PC. The first part of The Witcher was based on the Aurora Engine technology, a game engine developed by the Canadian company BioWare and first used in the computer role-playing game Neverwinter Nights, which was released on June 18, 2002. 

Of course, even by the standards of 2007, the Aurora Engine was an outdated graphics technology and it is clear that the new part of the The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings series needed an updated graphics engine. And they became RED Engine. This engine focuses not only on graphics and physics, but also on building a non-linear quest system, allowing you to make the gameplay even closer to real life. RED Engine supports dynamic shadows, normal mapping and parallax. 

The first version of the RED Engine in The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings only supports DirectX 9, which somewhat hampered the game in terms of manufacturability, although it made it inaccessible to previous generation consoles. The new version of the REDengine 2 engine brought The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings  to Xbox 360, albeit with a lower level of detail and quality. On PS3, this game never came out, apparently the developers could not adapt to the architecture of the console from Sony.

 

In February 2013, CD Projekt RED officially unveiled its new engine, REDengine 3, on which their two new games, Cyberpunk 2077 and the then-unannounced Witcher 3, were created. a story and a system that allows you to feed large-scale open worlds in a streaming manner. The advanced technology of REDengine 3 allows RPGs to compare with top shooters, both in terms of the presentation of the world and the events of a huge scale in which the player participates. 

 

The engine was natively compatible with current generation consoles, allowing it to blur the line between pre-rendered CGI movies and real-time graphics, revealing the most believable worlds ever created in a video game. A living ecosystem filled with objects, which are a kind of works of art, allows the player to become part of the environment. The new facial and body animation systems implemented in REDengine 3 provide realistic rendering of emotions, cinematic scenes and character interactions.

 

The technology uses HDR rendering with 64-bit depth, which produces the highest image quality with more realistic and reliable lighting without loss of detail. Flexible rendering ready for delayed or advanced rendering has a wide range of cinematic post-effects, including depth of field bokeh, color grading, flares from light sources. The high-quality terrain allows for multiple words of smoothly merging materials and uses tassellation to achieve the maximum amount of detail. The technology also includes seamless linking of animation and physics and a number of other features.

 

REDengine 3 uses a new version of the REDkit editor with tools designed specifically for creating RPG games. The editor allows you to create complex, branching quests and distribute them throughout the open world with a simplicity not available in any other editor.

TEST PART

GPU test

All video cards were tested at maximum graphics quality by MSI Afterburner. The purpose of the test is to determine how video cards from different manufacturers behave under the same conditions. Below is a video of the test segment:   

Our video cards were tested at resolutions of 1920x1080, 2560x1600 and 3840x2160 at the maximum graphics quality settings allowed by The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. AMD CrossFireX and  SLI work seamlessly in the game .

Almost all video cards are press samples from AMD and NVIDIA with stock frequencies. The exceptions are  MSI GeForce GTX 950 GAMING 2G ,  GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 960 WINDFORCE 2X 4G  and  XFX RADEON R9 380X DD BLACK EDITION .

Our testing this year:

 The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt GPU testThe Witcher 3: Wild Hunt GPU test

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt v.1.04 GPU test

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt v. 1.06 GPU test

The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt - Hearts of Stone GPU test

Testing at 1920x1080 resolution

  

Testing at maximum quality settings 1920x1080 

 

With these settings, video cards of the Radeon R9 280X or GeForce GTX 680 level showed an acceptable FPS.  Radeon R9 380X or GeForce GTX 770 would be the best solutions.

 

Testing at maximum quality settings 1920x1080 GameWorks

 

With these settings, video cards of the Radeon R9 280X or GeForce GTX 960 level showed an acceptable FPS.  Radeon R9 380X or GeForce GTX 780 would be the best solutions.

Testing at 2560x1440 resolution

Testing at maximum quality settings 2560x1440

 

With these settings, video cards of the Radeon R9 380X or GeForce GTX 690 level showed an acceptable FPS.  Radeon R9 290 or GeForce GTX TITAN would be the best solutions.

 

Testing at maximum quality settings 2560x1440 GameWorks

 

With these settings, video cards of the Radeon R9 290 or GeForce GTX 690i level showed an acceptable FPS. The best solutions would be the Radeon HD 7990 or GeForce GTX 780 Ti.

Testing at 3840x2160 resolution

 

Testing at maximum quality settings 3840x2160

 

With these settings, video cards of the Radeon R9 Fury X or GeForce GTX 780 SLI level showed an acceptable FPS. The best solutions would be   R9 Fury X or GeForce GTX 970 SLI .

 

Testing at maximum quality settings 3840x2160 GameWorks

 

With these settings, video cards of the Radeon R9 295X2 or GeForce GTX 980 Ti level showed an acceptable FPS. The best solutions are Radeon R9 295X2 or GeForce GTX 780 Ti SLI.

Testing of the video memory consumed by the game was carried out by the  MSI Afterburner program. The results on top video cards from AMD and NVIDIA were taken as the indicator at resolutions of  1920x1080 and 2560x1440 with various anti-aliasing settings.

Testing at maximum memory GPU quality settings

 

The recommended amount of video memory usage for 1920x1080 resolution will be 2048 MB of video memory, for 2560x1440 resolution - 3076 MB of video memory and for 3840x2160 resolution about 4096 MB of video memory. 

CPU test

We tested processor dependence on 16 models of basic configurations that are relevant today. The test was carried out in those places where the value of the video card for the game is minimal and its load was less than 99%, this time at a resolution of 1920x1080. 

Testing at maximum quality settings 1920x1080 

 

The performance of the processors in the game is sufficient, but it is optimal only for older models.

Loading of processor cores at maximum quality settings 1920x1080 Intel % 

 

Loading of processor cores  at maximum quality settings 1920x1080 AMD % 

 

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt uses up to 8 threads.

RAM test

The test was conducted on the base configuration Core i 7 5960X @ 4.6 GHz with the amount of pre-installed memory 32 GB DDR4 2400 MGz. All used RAM was taken as an indicator. The RAM test on the entire system was carried out on various test benches without running extraneous applications (browsers, etc.).

Testing the game's RAM consumption at various quality settings 

 

As we can see, at various quality settings, the amount of RAM consumed in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is within 3400 megabytes.

Testing system RAM consumption  

 

On a 6 GB system, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt consumes about 4.8 GB of RAM. In the presence of a system with 8 gigabytes, the RAM consumption of all RAM was 5.2 gigabytes. With a 16 GB system, total memory consumption was almost 6.2 GB. And with 32 gigabytes of RAM, the system consumes 7.2  gigabytes of RAM.