I preordered The Witcher 3 back in March, mostly off the strength of those E3 demos, and it actually showed up on time last Tuesday the 19th, which after the Ubisoft years of "day one patch just to make it playable" felt like a small miracle. CD Projekt Red apparently delayed this thing twice already (it was supposed to be out back in February), so I went in expecting either total polish or a disaster. Its neither, exactly. Its mostly the former with one specific, aggravating asterisk.
I've put about eleven hours into it since Tuesday, most of that this past weekend instead of doing literally anything else I was supposed to do. White Orchard alone probably ate two of those hours because I kept getting distracted chasing down side quests instead of following the main road north. The writing so far is better than it has any right to be for a game this big, and Geralt's voice actor (still don't know his name off the top of my head, sorry) somehow makes "hmm" sound like a full sentence about six different times an hour.
Heres the asterisk though. I run a Radeon card, an R9 290 thats maybe eighteen months old at this point, and the second I turned on NVIDIA HairWorks to get Geralt's magnificent chest-length hair to move around properly, my frame rate fell off a cliff. Were talking 60fps down into the high 30s in some cutscenes, and it stays choppy even outdoors just walking around if theres a wolf or a horse mane nearby getting the tessellation treatment. Turned HairWorks off entirely and got a huge chunk of that performance back immediately.
This isnt just me being bad at PC hardware. HairWorks is Nvidia's proprietary middleware, its baked into the game through GameWorks, and the tessellation it uses to render all that hair and fur is apparently cranked up so high that even Nvidia's own older cards choke on it a little. AMD cards choke on it a lot more, because (their argument, and I buy it) they never got access to the code to optimize their drivers against it before launch. Its not that AMD engineers are worse at their jobs, its that they were locked out of the black box until the rest of us already had the disc in hand. CD Projekt did add sliders for hair works quality and you can knock it down instead of just off, which helps some, but "some" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
I dont think this is some grand conspiracy, to be clear. I just think its a genuinely bad outcome for anyone who doesn't own the "right" brand of $300 graphics card, in a game that is otherwise shockingly well optimized everywhere else, running on their own REDengine 3 rather than some licensed Unreal or CryEngine setup. I turned off HairWorks and now I don't think about it, but it bugs me that the "off" switch was even necessary for a feature this cosmetic. Its hair. It should not be capable of costing you 20 frames a second.
Side note, not really related except that it also happened this same stretch of days: I saw Mad Max: Fury Road on Saturday afternoon between Witcher sessions, in a mostly empty 1pm showing, and it might be the best pure action movie Ive seen in years. Nothing to do with tech other than the fact that I spent the whole drive home thinking about how a two-hour car chase has better pacing than most 40-hour open world games manage in their first five hours. Make of that what you will.
Anyway. If youre building or buying a new rig soon and youre leaning AMD, dont let this scare you off the game itself, just go in expecting to live in the graphics menu for the first hour instead of the actual game. Turn HairWorks off, set your shadows to high instead of ultra, and the rest of it runs beautifully. I'm going back in tonight. Yennefer showed up about twenty minutes before I had to stop playing and I have a feeling I'm not getting much sleep this week.