stuttering

[24km/h peek zeyr0n]

so yesterday i installed the game and it worked fine with no frame drops or stuttering , but today its barely playable , and i just want to enjoy the game . i tried few settings even playing with vsync on or fps limit but nothing

here are my specs : rtx 4060 , i5-12450h , 16gb ddr4 3200 ( msi laptop )

[Basilicus]

DX11 or DX12?

Some updates to improve the DX12 performance negatively impacted the DX11 performance. Some of that has been fixed, some hasn't, and I'm not particularly knowledgeable about DX11 fixes. I'll address DX12 if that's what you're using, which makes sense with your specs.

Make sure you're playing on 1080 or 1440, and not 4k. Play at 60 FPS unless you want to turn all the graphics settings way down.

Turn DLSS on. Turn to Balanced or Performance.

Try with Ray Tracing both on and off to see the difference in load on the GPU.

If playing with Ray Tracing on, make sure it's on performance and not quality. There'll be 3 sub-options under Ray Tracing to turn on or off. Turn off Ray Traced Reflections. This will kick the SSR setting on. Go to SSR and turn it to Low. This still looks good, but above all else DO NOT leave SSR on high - it is not implemented right.

Turn NVIDIA hair off entirely, or set it to Geralt Only and Low Quality. Leave the AA on it at default (I think it's 4). It'll still look good.

If performance suffers in cities with crowds, turn Background Characters down to Medium or even Low to see if there's a difference. This is the most CPU-heavy setting.

Two of the most demanding GPU settings are Foliage Visibility and Grass Density. Turn both down to Medium. See if there's a difference. If you find you have to choose one or the other, Foliage Visibility makes the landscapes look better overall.

I've got a 14700k, 4070 Super, 32 GB RAM desktop, and I've had stuttering problems in Witcher 3 with it. My rig is built for cooling, and DX12 Witcher 3 with Ray Tracing and high settings still runs my card as hot as Cyberpunk with way more bells and whistles.

DX12 looks beautiful in the game but isn't that well optimized here. I find turning some of these settings down makes small differences in GPU load and temp, but a ton of difference in the stuttering. That said, some frame lag is almost impossible to avoid in the DX12 implementation. The key is just to make it manageable and harder to notice as you play. You'll almost certainly have to play without any Ultra settings - the only one I use with my build is Terrain Quality.

It's better to turn graphics settings down to see if you can get it to appear smoother (like I said, their DX12 implementation means it'll never be perfect, just more manageable). It's easier to add options back on as you go to see where the threshold of unacceptable performance starts. Start with the settings I've suggested since these are the most demanding.

One thing with DX12 is you'll never fully get away from some pop-in of distant details. That's just something you have to learn to live, unfortunately.

Some people have also rolled back versions of the game entirely. Look at some other threads as to how to do this. You can certainly play a pre-Next Gen version of Witcher 3 at 4k, 144 fps, with everything turned to high if you want. Just be aware that a Next Gen save will not load in an older version. An old save will load in Next Gen, but not the other way around.