In Other News – 19 March 2015

Enjoy the read. Witcher 3 ultra related.

By Heiko Klinge

This is how The Witcher 3 looks with ultra details.

The Witcher 3 is two months away from release and already feels nicely
rounded out, without bugs and above all, much less hardware-hungry than
in its last major press event in late January. This is probably the most
surprising finding of Gamestar chief editor Heiko Klinge last week as
the world’s first journalist who was allowed to play the mammoth
role-playing game from CD Projekt for full two days and without
restrictions.

Without restrictions means that even with maximum graphic details. So we
cranked up all different types of configurable graphics options from
the grass density to texture, water and terrain details to ‘Ultra’.
Because in our PC (Intel i7-4790, 16GB RAM) there was also a Geforce GTX
980, we were also able to activate the option “Nvidia Hair Works”. The
result, to put it lightly, knocked our socks off: In Geralt’s face, we
saw each skin pore, his long shadow spread in the setting sun like a bed
sheet on a dense colorful flower meadow, the breeze made his white hair
flutter realistically in the wind.

But what’s even more important than all the graphic splendor: Even with
ultra details the game ran at 60 frames per second and a lot smoother
than the Preview code from the press event in January did, where we
“only” saw the game on High details. Only in the densely populated
Novigrad there was some noticeable stuttering, but CD project aims to
optimize the performance up to the launch even further.

During our two times with the game, we only noticed three bugs: Once we
lost control of camera readjustment during a fight, a saved game could
not be loaded (a restart fixed the problem), and once we had a horse
make itself comfortable on a three-meter column, which was funny rather
than annoying.

Completely bug-free – something that a project of this magnitude will
certainly not be. But the delay has definitely done good for the Witcher
3. At least our impression of the state of the game is already better
than that of its predecessor before release. This is also suggested by
the fact that CD Projekt no longer have to worry only about bug fixing,
but also have time for a few cosmetic changes. So the vegetation pop-in
should be reduced further.

Also, if you get the copy of their magazine that comes out on March 21. there should be further details etc. as well as new pictures. They did not specify those were going to be screenshots, so we’ll have to wait and see, could just be a new artwork or two.

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