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The Witcher 2 Gains Yet Another Performance Beta

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I really do have to hand it to Virtual Programming for sticking at it despite harsh feedback from a lot of people. The Witcher 2 has another performance improvement beta release.

Today (14th August) comes with:
QuotePublic Beta 4 - buildID 355503

This contains the following:

- OpenGL worker thread now goes to sleep when it can, freeing up a cpu core for other things. This really helps speed up level loads especially.
- Optimised our use of memory barriers and using coherent buffers where appropriate
- Optimised handling of fences
- Use ARB_texture_storage for texture uploads. Again, should improve level loading times.
- Optimised our OpenGL state cache

Most of these performance optimisations are best seen on nVidia hardware at the moment. Major performance improvements are expected in the near future through the work of AMD and Intel driver developer teams.

We're aware of two potential crash on exit bugs.. one appears to be nvidia driver related. We're still chasing the other one.

Source Announcement

Check out The Witcher 2 on Steam if you want to see how it performs for you, but be sure to opt into the beta.

My Thoughts
This is done on:
Intel i5 4670K 3.4GHZ
8GB DDR3 RAM
Nvidia 560ti

It's now actually playable for me on LOW settings (1920x1080) with FPS even hitting 40FPS which is a massive difference from the 10-20FPS on LOW when the Linux version initially came out. It actually feels responsive and smooth on LOW settings now.

On Medium (1920x1080) it's sadly another story with it on the exact same area hitting a max of 20FPS, and with dips down to 9-10FPS regularly. The input lag does seem to be sorted, but the game-play does still feel sluggish and not playable.

Update: If I put down the resolution to 1280x720 on MED it does go up to ~30FPS at least with a max of around 40FPS (third screenshot)

See the shots below for comparison (luckily GLXOSD now works again!):
imageimage
image
How does it run for you now? Kudos to VP for the good support and attempts to fix it. Still, until it is playable with at least 30+FPS on MED I wouldn't call it done just yet. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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About the author -
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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39 comments
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Liam Dawe Aug 15, 2014
Oddly in the same area at 1920x1080 that gave me 20FPS now gives me a solid 30+ FPS today.
omer666 Aug 15, 2014
Quoting: GuestEdit: I found this benchmark that measured TW2 at 63 FPS on my GPU. The game uses almost exactly 50% of my CPU though so I think it’s limited to 2 threads, and the faster CPU used in the benchmark must have helped.

Indeed it tells that it should run at 63 FPS, but they don't tell about the rest of the config... On my computer since last update I'm running it at an average 45-50 FPS at 1920x1080, measured using voglperf, so in fact it's getting closer to the performance reported in this article...

[Edit] Didn't see this article was 2 years old... so yeah CPU usage must still be insufficient compared to Windows. Hopefully they'll continue to improve it.

[Edit 2] This benchmark (in french) was done on the following config:
ntel Core i7 3960X (HT off, Turbo 1/2/3/4/6 cores: 4 GHz)
Asus P9X79 WS
8 Go DDR3 2133 Corsair
Windows 7 64 bits

Here are the results : http://www.hardware.fr/articles/896-20/benchmark-the-witcher-2-ee.html

We can see that it runs at an avergae 48 FPS... I'm quite lost now...
Mohandevir Aug 15, 2014
At least, what is positive, it's the frequency of the game updates. It's the 3 one in about 2 weeks. We can hope for a playable game for all in a near future.
Vissy Aug 15, 2014
I picked this up yesterday for $3.99 on steam. It runs quite well(ultra specs) on my desktop with Nvidia 750 TI and runs decently with med specs on my laptop that has a geforce GT 445M.

It seems to crash after an hour of playing though, but go back in after crash and I was good to go for another hour. The auto save feature is a god send because of this. Steam cloud saves work well.
HadBabits Aug 16, 2014
GTX 645 + i7 4770 720p resolution

High and medium specs stick right at 30 FPS (assuming this is due to V-sync) give or take a frame.

Low specs fluctuated between 70 and 45 somewhat wildly.

I'm glad you mentioned the resolution thing, I didn't notice it ran at 1080 by default :P
oldrocker99 Aug 16, 2014
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I haven't yet installed GLXOSD, but the game runs smoothly for me; blur works well enough for me to find it attractive but annoying, and I'm still wandering around Flotsam, having closed the incense shop, gotten my silver sword, looking for monster slime. No crashes, fighting works the way it's supposed to. It all is very reminiscent of how well it ran with WINE, and I mean that as praise.

Yes, I'd rather have a native port, but this was commissioned and initiated by RedProjekt, who are elbow deep programming The Wild Hunt, and wasn't like CIV V, which was initiated by Aspyr, who then contacted a very willing Firaxis for the go ahead. The devs of the wrapper have weathered some pretty nasty criticism aimed at them, but they've been busy at it, trying to (gasp) make the customers happy.

This customer is happy.
killx_den Aug 17, 2014
I ran it on ultra settings (no vsync and no uber sampling) @ 1920x1080

i7 3770
32gb ram
gainward phantom 670gtx

Lowest fps (49.2)


Average fps (71.7)


Highest fps (104.7)
Belarrius Aug 22, 2014
Ubuntu 14.04.1
Kernel 3.13.0-34-generic
GPU : Nvidia GTX 470
CPU : AMD FX 3.5GHz (8 threads)
Driver : 343.13

I have 40-60fps with high spec "withouth Uber sampling and vsync"
n30p1r4t3 11 years Aug 29, 2014
Just did some testing of my own. Gnome shell and arch linux on my 4710MQ and 860M is able to play this game on ultra (uber off) and well above 60FPS.
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