Benchmarks for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Arrive; GameWorks Video Showcases the Technologies

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The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is very nearly here (unless you got it from a place that broke the street date), so what better way to pass those last remaining moments than with some benchmarks and videos? PC Games Hardware has put almost every video card possible through a benchmark test of the game, and the numbers get rather interesting when you're playing with every possible setting enabled, particularly the NVIDIA GameWorks ones. Every card was played at 1920x1080 resolution, with in-game settings at Ultra and in-game AA enabled. The AMD cards were tested with the Catalyst 15.4.1 beta drivers and the NVIDIA cards with the brand new Game Ready 352.86 WHQL drivers, and suffice to say, the NVIDIA cards come out on top.

The NVIDIA cards can handle HairWorks with ease, of course, but the AMD cards even seem to struggle when HBAO+ is enabled. However, when you disable both HairWorks and HBAO+, things tend to even out, at least with the preview build and the current AMD drivers. Most cards tend to range from ~30FPS to ~60FPS, although only the GTX TITAN X can hit 60FPS at the highest settings. Otherwise you're looking at the 40 - 45FPS range on the AMD R9 290X and GeForce GTX 970 and 980. Dropping to less powerful cards drop the FPS in the 30 - 40 range, with anything under a GTX 770 hitting no higher than 25FPS. Of course, those are numbers on Ultra with things like HairWorks, HBAO+, AA, and the like enabled. Dropping the details to High and playing around with the other settings should help improve performance immensely. Oh, and if you're playing at 4K, the GTX TITAN X tops out at 30FPS, the GTX 980 at 24FPS, the GTX 970 at 21, and the R9 290X at 22FPS.

If you're curious what the GameWorks technologies add to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, such as HairWorks, the video below gives you an example of how glorious they can look. Especially the hair, which you can tailor to show just for Geralt or for everything, including the animals and monsters, as you can see. PhysX is also shown, with Geralt's clothes, flags, banners, boat sails, and more utilizing it.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt arrives tomorrow, May 19, for the PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. It digitally unlocks on the PC in a matter of minutes, although I'm unsure if the console versions get the same treatment. An Expansion Pass can be picked up for $24.99 to add an extra 30 hours of content starting in October.

Source: PC Games Hardware (in German) and

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