The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Is Coming To SteamOS, Linux

[smitty3268]

That reads like complete nonsense. The generation is more important than the abstract target number, and often i5 is as fast as i7, actually they are much faster for gaming at any given price point.

It was obviously meant to be a loose abstraction. In particular i've noticed most people complaining have SLOW CPUs, most of which are i3 or i5 models. Obviously somebody could take some clow CPU and overclock it to double it's speed and have something fast, or have a top end i5 that runs fast. You're completely missing my point by nitpicking at the details.

* Also, a lot of the people complaining about 10-20 fps performance have reported that changing the resolution from low to high or vice versa barely makes any difference for them, which further indicates a CPU limitation and not a GPU one.

[hiryu]

I get shit performance with The Witcher 2 on my hardware in Linux as well.

i7 4960x
32GB memory
GTX 780 (337.25)
1080p

I seem to get anywhere from the low 20's up to 40 fps. I don't actually have anything installed to verify the framerate, I'm just eye balling it. At the very least it's clear the framerate is super jerky which makes it too distracting to play. I'm installing the gog version through wine to see if that gives me better performance.

The other issue is that the game tends to be _extremely_ crashy too. It seems something about the game looks off in linux too. It seems the details just don't look as good (I have everything up pretty high). But maybe that's placebo because I haven't been able to play in Windows for months. Today is a relatively slow day for me, so maybe I'll be able to reboot and compare before the weekend is up.

In Windows, I get a consistent 60 fps (with vsync on obviously). Witcher 2 is a _fantastic_ game and I'd generally say it's worth rebooting for. Although I heard great things, I held off on getting it for a long time because I'm generally not into fantasy. When GOG made a drm-free version available for $20, I decided to give it a shot. It's one of the best games I've ever played.

However, I have a full time job and I work much more efficiently in Linux (I'm a sys admin). Rebooting to play games here and there is generally pretty impractical. I have to re-open all my applications and sessions when I come back to linux, which makes the process take quite a bit longer.

[deppman]

Thanks!

I have a GTX660 and a Phenon II 995 and the game runs with max settings. The performance on windows is better (there is some benchmarks on github). But my experience playing on Linux was good (I guess the problems on linux is about cpu and amd cards). There is a problem if you have a lot of saves (so aways delete the old ones). Don't play in desktop with effects like compiz, unity (runs worse, the fullscreen is fake). I guess your experience will be good with your machine.

That's good info. One reason I run KDE is it is trivial to trun compositing explicitly off, so this should be a good fit. I'll probably give it a try tomorrow and report back!

[Kivada]

Seems like a lot of people complaining have i3 or i5 CPUs, which don't seem to be fast enough.

The i7 wouldn't make much any difference, eON is single threaded only, this is why Witcher2 runs like a fat kid in a tar pit.

[Kivada]

It was obviously meant to be a loose abstraction. In particular i've noticed most people complaining have SLOW CPUs, most of which are i3 or i5 models. Obviously somebody could take some clow CPU and overclock it to double it's speed and have something fast, or have a top end i5 that runs fast. You're completely missing my point by nitpicking at the details.

* Also, a lot of the people complaining about 10-20 fps performance have reported that changing the resolution from low to high or vice versa barely makes any difference for them, which further indicates a CPU limitation and not a GPU one.

Wrong, the i7 only nets you HyperThreading and in some cases a bit more L2 cache over the i5, which is why it doesn't make sense to buy an i7 for gaming unless you intend to also stream. Though even there it's actually AMD's 8 core CPUs that shine as the testing shows that the 8 real cores actually net you the streaming capability with no penalty to game performance where there is one for the i7's fake HyperThread cores.

Source, the Windows gaming sites.

[smitty3268]

Wrong, the i7 only nets you HyperThreading and in some cases a bit more L2 cache over the i5, which is why it doesn't make sense to buy an i7 for gaming unless you intend to also stream. Though even there it's actually AMD's 8 core CPUs that shine as the testing shows that the 8 real cores actually net you the streaming capability with no penalty to game performance where there is one for the i7's fake HyperThread cores.

Source, the Windows gaming sites.

Oh. My. God.

Does it make you feel better if i say "fast" and "slow" CPU?

Ok, fine. I'll say fast and slow. Whatever.

Now back to the actual point......

[mmstick]

It was obviously meant to be a loose abstraction. In particular i've noticed most people complaining have SLOW CPUs, most of which are i3 or i5 models. Obviously somebody could take some clow CPU and overclock it to double it's speed and have something fast, or have a top end i5 that runs fast. You're completely missing my point by nitpicking at the details.

* Also, a lot of the people complaining about 10-20 fps performance have reported that changing the resolution from low to high or vice versa barely makes any difference for them, which further indicates a CPU limitation and not a GPU one.

It indicates a software limitation, not a CPU limitation. I have a 4GHz processor that struggles in the teens with Witcher 2 thanks to an awful eON wrapper. It doesn't help that there isn't any multithreaded rendering at all. Bad code on their part does not constitute the need to buy LN2 to overclock a processor to 6Ghz on my part.

[Kivada]

Oh. My. God.

Does it make you feel better if i say "fast" and "slow" CPU?

Ok, fine. I'll say fast and slow. Whatever.

Now back to the actual point......

What? The point that you don't know what you are talking about? I wasn't making an "X is better, Y sucks balls" argument, you plainly stated that you think that the reason people are getting bad results in Witcher2 is because they aren't running an i7, which I and others pointed out isn't the case as the IPC of the i7 is no better then that of the i5, which is why the informed gamer wouldn't waste money on the i7 unless they where going to also do allot of video editing or where running more then 2 GPUs.

[smitty3268]

What? The point that you don't know what you are talking about? I wasn't making an "X is better, Y sucks balls" argument, you plainly stated that you think that the reason people are getting bad results in Witcher2 is because they aren't running an i7, which I and others pointed out isn't the case as the IPC of the i7 is no better then that of the i5, which is why the informed gamer wouldn't waste money on the i7 unless they where going to also do allot of video editing or where running more then 2 GPUs.

No, the point was that the game is cpu limited for many people. I've made said point 3 times now, but you keep wandering off into the bushes and focusing on the fact i said i7 instead of fast. Congratulations. You win a cookie.

[xeekei]

Seems like a lot of people complaining have i3 or i5 CPUs, which don't seem to be fast enough.

I've read complaints too. Which is why it is odd that my AMD FX-8350 seems fast enough. I also have 16 GBs of 1600 MHz CL9 DDR3 RAM, and a slightly factory OC'd GTX 670 2GB. Proprietary driver of course. The game doesn't run awesome. But I do get over 30.