Hairworks Is Not Worth It - Frame-rate Killer!

[Francis_Mallman]

I have two GTX 980s.

Simply by disabling Hairworks, I can downsample this game to 4K, and still maintain 60 FPS.

If I turn Hairworks on, I have to switch off the downsample. The choice then becomes A) Hairworks, or B) a 4K downsample, which has a pretty dramatic effect on the clarity of the game.

Seems like a no brainer. Hairworks is just too costly. You give up a lot to gain very little.

[Dellicious]

Fluffy wolves though.

[Francis_Mallman]

Originally posted by Dellicious:

Fluffy wolves though.

Not worth it.

IMO, Hairworks should be your first tradeoff. Even if, like myself, you don't actually need to trade anything off, you're better off downsampling, because that's more dramatic.

[hinti21]

You can alter the anti aliasing of the hair in some ini. By default its set to 8, if you change it to 4 it will give you a performance boost.

[SimFan]

It only drops my frames by 5 to 7. Don't see much difference with it on or off.

[Dread Pirate H]

Originally posted by Dellicious:

Fluffy wolves though.

+1 for fluffies

[hinti21]

Originally posted by falcon_x:

It only drops my frames by 5 to 7. Don't see much difference with it on or off.

On the actual hair, the difference isnt that major (besides making hair reactive to wind and movement), but on fur the difference is huge.

[Vellari]

Originally posted by hinti21:

Originally posted by falcon_x:

It only drops my frames by 5 to 7. Don't see much difference with it on or off.

On the actual hair, the difference isnt that major (besides making hair reactive to wind and movement), but on fur the difference is huge.

This. Huge.

http://core0.staticworld.net/images/article/2015/05/witcher-3-nvidia-hairworks-example-100586285-orig.png

[GipsyDanger <(*_*)O=('.'O)]

I wouldn't be surprised if Nvidia made a contract investment with the dev company to throw hairworks into the game just so Nvidia could "flex" it's tech and make people think they need to buy better video cards than they have already. It's not as if the hair detailing looks bad to begin with. It's actually pretty good. And by good, I mean that it isn't noticeably bad in a way that detracts from a scene.

It reminds me of the Hair Tesselation option from Tomb Raider. The game ran fine with a market average card on the highest settings - but as soon as you turn it on the FPS just tanks.

I don't know that Hair Works will ever see any real success in any game without some cleverly coded shaders. The fact remains that as soon as you start applying the full brunt of a complex physics engine on realistically moving something with as many pieces as an entire scalp of hair, it's going to get rediculous to render. Geralts "dynamically growing" beard alone has 6000 strands. Hell, in order to make the algorithm even possible for even top market computers to render in real time, they had to saturate the animal fur movement with blur effect to make it look like more animation is happening than actually is - it's mostly just a handful, maybe a dozen separate tufts with their own animation. Still, coding all of that together just for hair is really silly.

[Hanuman]

It is the best graphical feature in the game.

If you had seen the Gryphon at 2560x1440 with ULTRA+, HBAO+, Hairworks on all NPCs, monster, mobs - running smooth at 70FPS.

You would be in awe.

Best new feature - if you have a rig to enjoy it.

I actually made a thread about it:

[Hanuman]

http://steamcommunity.com/app/292030/discussions/0/613958868350539153/

Is the link to the thread I made after I updated to the new NVIDIA driver and realized it was defaulting to windowed instead of full screen and fixed that too.

[Francis_Mallman]

Hanhuman, you obviously can't do 4k on your rig.

Because given the choice between a 4k Witcher, or a Hairwaoks Witcher, most gamers, I suspect, would opt for 4k.

[Francis_Mallman]

BTW, you talked about 'acceptable performance' below 40 FPS.

Unless you have Freesync or Gsync, nothing below 60 FPS is acceptable.

If your monitor displays at 60Hz, then as soon as you drop below 60 FPS you'll get stutter, since your GPU and your monitor will no longer be in sync.

[Vellari]

Dunno, running 1440p with a 60hz monitor, get 40-45 fps. Feels smooth as silk to me.

[Francis_Mallman]

The phrase 'smooth as silk' is interesting.

If you have a fixed frequency 60Hz monitor, then gameplay between 40-45 FPS will be far from smooth as silk.

Just because you personally can't see the stutter, doesn't mean it's not there. At 40-45 FPS your monitor is being forced to compensate for the lag by redrawing frames. This isn't even debateable. It's a fact.

[Phat Monkey]

Same here not noticing much difference on old titan cards 2 way SLI, everything maxed..