The Witcher 3 is Dangerously Unstable in its Current State

[Tacticus Winter]

So for the past week, I've likely spent upwards of 11 hours trying to troubleshoot my game.

Originally, I was having awful screen tearing, freezing during cutscenes, crashes, and even full on GPU crashes on my GTX 1070.

I had tried every possible solution from reverting back to old drivers, moving my steam path, lowering settings, every combination of resolution, I changed my display refresh rate, updated drivers, deleted files and verified cache, etc.. etc..

To be sure of a hardware malfunction, I ran stress tests and even pumped up games like DayZ, GTA V, and War Thunder to higher settings, and not even so much as a stutter. Let alone a full on GPU crash.

So at last, I finally resulted to dropping the game back down to Classic 1.32 and doing a complete wipe and reinstall of my Graphics Driver. And that HOPEFULLY GOD WILLING has fixed the problem as I ran through 4 cutscenes without a stutter or screen tear.

The only conclusion I can make is either that the newer NVIDIA drivers are incompatible with the Witcher 3's update or the new update is incompatible with current NVIDIA drivers. Either way, it's dangerously unstable and causing frequent GPU crashes for me, and I'm sure others as well.

[Mazza]

The minimum and recommended system requirement's for this game are grossly incorrect.

You're trying to arguably play a poorly remastered game on a 7 year old GPU. You're not going to have a good time my man.

Unless you've got a CPU and GPU that was released within the last 2-3 years AND you really really really want to play with all the new graphical upgrades and maybe RT then you should be playing this "Next Gen" version of the game.

Otherwise I'd stick to using the old 1.32 with a few mods tbh !!!

Also the other games you mentioned are extremely well optimised (Compared to TW3NG) OR they are super easy to run so you cannot compare performance there.

[Captain Pansy]

i play with a 3090 and i still get crashes all the time.
the next gen update made the game trash level.

[Tacticus Winter]

Originally posted by Mazza:

The minimum and recommended system requirement's for this game are grossly incorrect.

You're trying to arguably play a poorly remastered game on a 7 year old GPU. You're not going to have a good time my man.

Unless you've got a CPU and GPU that was released within the last 2-3 years AND you really really really want to play with all the new graphical upgrades and maybe RT then you should be playing this "Next Gen" version of the game.

Otherwise I'd stick to using the old 1.32 with a few mods tbh !!!

Also the other games you mentioned are extremely well optimised (Compared to TW3NG) OR they are super easy to run so you cannot compare performance there.

Well there's also some other games I run and don't crash on like Tarkov. DayZ and War Thunder are quite fairly demanding games and I can crank those up to higher settings and not have full on GPU crashes. Same with Tarkov.

Obviously I may not be able to run the Next-Gen update smoothly, which is fair, but it shouldn't cause full on GPU crashes.

That's telling me that something in the game is causing GPU files to become corrupt or something or another along those lines. Regardless, it's a game-specific issue that should be quite worrisome to anyone.

There's also the chance that NVIDIA's latest 2023 drivers are not as stable as they let on, I had problems with those earlier this year and had to revert back to Summer 2022 drivers. The new drivers could've caused some files to corrupt.

[worm_master]

I'm usein AMD an the only trouble i have is i cant run RT.. or I can but very poorly, my GC aint quite up to the job, even though it's a RT card.

Any-way I'm running the DX12 and pulling down between 95-140 FPS depending on location, with no crashes or interrupts or stutters. I have Win 10 an 64GB RAM

[Six of Saturn]

Yep. For me 1 out of 5 game loads crashes. Around 5% of the time I oil my swords crashes. I get about 2-3 crashes per 6hr session. But I am use to it and save often just like a heavily modded Skyrim session.

[CupCupBaconBox]

The current patch, 4.04, is very unstable for me. I too get loading crashes about 20% of the time, and when applying oils (inside the inventory menu, not the quick menu) or equipping/unequipping items or crossbow bolts the game crashes like every 3rd time I open the menu and try to change something. This never happened in 4.03. Since the recent update, I have had probably 50-75 crashes, even after fully reinstalling the game and carefully updating all my mods. Even if the issue is one of my mods, it wasn't happening in version 4.03, so I still blame the new patch.

[Elena]

6900XT I'm on my fourth crash just today.

[HealthyGamer255]

I must be lucky. 7900xtx and i7 13700k here. Max ray tracing and all ultra + with fsr2. Only one crash in about 30 hours of play across various regions. My only crash was in the battle of kaer morhen. Froze twice same spot so i switched to dx11 for that part and switched it back. Been perfect since "knocks on wood" .

[Elena]

Originally posted by HealthyGamer255:

I must be lucky. 7900xtx and i7 13700k here. Max ray tracing and all ultra + with fsr2. Only one crash in about 30 hours of play across various regions. My only crash was in the battle of kaer morhen. Froze twice same spot so i switched to dx11 for that part and switched it back. Been perfect since "knocks on wood" .

OMG!! I'm so happy for you. It's definitely not luck. It's because you're sooooooooooo awesome...... With all of the ultra!!!!!!! Gosh, I don't know how you're still walking this earth.

Now, let's get back to the topic.
So I assume there is nothing we could do about it.
Are we just waiting for a new patch?

[NewMessiah]

This game has been out for almost 10 years. Why does it crash so often? I have a 7700x and 6750xt and it crashes pretty often, but runs great while it is working. And the crashes seem to happen randomly, with no warning.

[S T R I V E]

This is not to say im correct but its some reasons that people ignore ,

Reason's i have had crashing issues in the past for games are out of date drivers ,
having low end hardware trying to run high end settings leading to over heating and crashing , over clocking your graphic card also causes a lot of games to crash , and sometimes forgetting to check for windows updates , your anti virus software could be causing it , memory problems
with system memory , or a ram stick has physical damage
, windows bugs and trying to run on non compatible operating systems and corrupted game files , sometimes disabling background processes , that are using a lot of memory usually browser related .

hope you fix it as im aware crashing is a pain in the ass .

[longjohn119]

If you have 20 games and only one of them has crashing issues the likelihood that the problem is the game itself is better than 90% and probably close to 99%

I haven't tried the latest patch because I'm still waiting for them to correct the CPU threading issues but from what I'm seeing the crash problem is likely similar to the problems AC Valhalla has and is related to memory transfer problems from system RAM to VRAM. Basically you have a DX11 game engine poorly converted to DX12. DX11 and DX12 are two entirely different beasts when it comes to the way CPU threading, memory management and shader pipelines work and you need to completely rewrite core sections of a DX11 game engine to make it work with DX12. There are no shortcuts or easy conversions or wrappers that can get the job done.

[UsykP4P]

Originally posted by Mazza:

The minimum and recommended system requirement's for this game are grossly incorrect.

You're trying to arguably play a poorly remastered game on a 7 year old GPU. You're not going to have a good time my man.

Unless you've got a CPU and GPU that was released within the last 2-3 years AND you really really really want to play with all the new graphical upgrades and maybe RT then you should be playing this "Next Gen" version of the game.

Otherwise I'd stick to using the old 1.32 with a few mods tbh !!!

Also the other games you mentioned are extremely well optimised (Compared to TW3NG) OR they are super easy to run so you cannot compare performance there.

13900KF and RTX 4090 and it crashes all the time on DX12, DX11 is much smoother though.

[S T R I V E]

Originally posted by UsykP4P:

Originally posted by Mazza:

The minimum and recommended system requirement's for this game are grossly incorrect.

You're trying to arguably play a poorly remastered game on a 7 year old GPU. You're not going to have a good time my man.

Unless you've got a CPU and GPU that was released within the last 2-3 years AND you really really really want to play with all the new graphical upgrades and maybe RT then you should be playing this "Next Gen" version of the game.

Otherwise I'd stick to using the old 1.32 with a few mods tbh !!!

Also the other games you mentioned are extremely well optimised (Compared to TW3NG) OR they are super easy to run so you cannot compare performance there.

13900KF and RTX 4090 and it crashes all the time on DX12, DX11 is much smoother though.

I have a i7 13700k AND A RTX 3060 i have been playing for 10 hours without a crash , i do have my fps capped to 60 fps as its just a single player game im using DX12 but i have half the machine you do maybe its NVIDIA drivers .

[enderbeta]

Originally posted by Captain Pansy:

i play with a 3090 and i still get crashes all the time.
the next gen update made the game trash level.

Sadly it isn't just this game but CyberPunk also. Whatever they have done with the games has seriously broken something.