Hi,

I've just bought TW2EE and had the surprise to notice how bad it performs. It set my settings based on my pc to Ultra, inside the game I was having a mere 7 FPS (Fraps). Set it to low and it barely got to 30.

Am I not aware of some sort of tweak ? Because if this is the normal game performance I feel I threw my money out the window, given the fact there is no demo. I mean, in gpu benchmarks I have way better performance than this game. Something is not right.

Thank you

CPU: I5-2400 3Ghz
RAM: 4GB
GPU: Gigabyte 550gtx
PSU: Corsair 550vx
OS: Win7 64

Your video card is not even close to make anything to work on ultra. In the video card performance for nVidia cards the most important number is the second one. The first number is generation of the card and the second one is the processing power. For example, the GTX 380 will be faster than GTX 550 on the tests that support features that exists in both video cards, but 550 has some features that are missing in 380, which may or may not affect the performance. Anything below 80 as the last two digits nor nVidia cards are NOT the GAMING video cards. nVidia GTX 550 is a video card for office needs. You can play very old video games on it maxed out, of course. I suggest, you should upgrade your video card to at least GTX 570, better GTX 580 or if you don't have money for it 480. Also, if you want to play on large resolutions, make sure you have 2 or 3 GB of video memory.

My video card is more than OK. I can play other titles (which are pretty demanding) with no problem. As I've seen on the web, everyone thinks this game suffers from poor optimization. Plus, there are examples on youtube which demonstrate that the 550gtx is more than enough to run this game properly.

This game uses 700M of video ram on the highest texture setting. If a game needs 2-3 or more gb of memory, like you recommend, then something is WRONG with the game.

Am I the only one who finds it disturbing that you are advised to buy (upgrade) hardware worth of thousands to play a 30$ game ? Come on ?

Anyway, I've managed to get it to act normally:

Resolution: 1600x900 windowed (normally 1920x1080 fullscreen)
SSAO: Off
Depth of Field: Off
Ubersampling: Off
Vsync: Adaptive

In a game, usually the shadows are the most demanding, taking a hit to your fps, but in this game, changing the shadow detail had no effect on performance.

Make sure that cinematic depth of field is disabled as well . This seems to be the biggest FPS hitter since the launch of the EE . You won`t need Vsync or AA unless you experience screen tearing . You can probably get a few for FPS by going to 1280 x 720 .

The configurator isn`t at all reliable for automatic settings as you now have noticed .

Looking at this review: http://www.techspot.com/review/405-the-witcher-2-performance/page4.html
Having ubersampling off while running Ultra is too much on that 550gtx. Maybe you should try running it on High/medium. Also disabling depth of field will help. Also you should get the newest drivers for your video card and have you game patched up.

The automatic settings is really bad. I previously had radeon 5670 and it suggested Ultra settings while that card was able to run the game on low settings.

Shadows were the most demanding feature long time ago, now it's the old news, unless you want the shadow from the "grass", which is represented by millions of 3D objects. Ubersampling is on the other hand is a GPU killer. You should never turn it on, developers mentioned that they did it for future more powerful video cards, so that you can play on improved quality graphics 4-5 years from now. Another very costly feature is anisotropic filtering, because it renders the screen with all present features several times to make it look smooth.

In comparison to other titles that you can run fine TW2 is made for PC, not for consoles as other titles. Consoles have very weak graphic cards by modern standards.

And whatever you say, your card is weak. Nobody force you to upgrade to expensive cards. So it's not disturbing that buyers of better video cards get better graphics. Even on the "low" settings graphics looks amazing. So, just accept the fact that you won't be able to play it on maxed out settings. I played it on 2xSLI 8700 GT cards, which are six freaking years old now and 8700 GT was not the most powerful video card of that time. And my settings were not the lowest possible and I've got 20-22 fps, so don't tell me that it's not optimized to perform well.