Is there any way to make The Witcher 2 not laggy?

S

Sycraft

Supreme [H]ardness
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I finally decided to give it a try (as with many games, I've owned it but never played it) and I find it unplayable because of the lag. The game is just not responsive to input. Be it when you are steering the camera or in menus, it lags bad.

It seems to be at least partially FPS related but then how can one improve that? I set it for low spec and at best I could pull like 74fps in the tutorial, and it would drop to 40ish plenty of times. This is on an i7-2600k/GTX680 system that has no problems with BF3, GW2, Shogun 2, Skyrim, etc, etc.

Am I missing some trick, or is this just shit you have to put up with to play the game? I would think that even with a lower FPS the input shouldn't lag so hard (I am ok in GW2 when it drops below 60fps) and that I should be able to pull 60+ FPS solid, at least in low, given that my system is fairly heavy hitting.
 
1. Turn off ubersampling.

2. It's a known issue that the tutorial portion they added to the game has jittery problems. I played and beat this game on a first gen quad core and 4GB of RAM. It had a few framerate problems, but that was CPU bottlenet, but nothing like you're having.
 
Ubersampling was off. It was on low, as in all the way turned down.
 
That's weird, i never had issues with the game when I played a loooong time ago. Was always capped at 60fps w/o uber, and about 40-45 with uber with 2 580s back then at 1080p.
 
Brianmz said:
It consumes a lot of power still, at 2560x1440, i need to have my 2 780s at 1200mhz to keep it at 60fps synced.
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wow...I guess playing with ubersampling enabled at 1920 x 1200 with my GTX 580 is out of the question then
 
polonyc2 said:
wow...I guess playing with ubersampling enabled at 1920 x 1200 with my GTX 580 is out of the question then
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Ubersampling is just fancy name for super sampling antialiasing. That mofo needs power. There is a reason why MSAA and now post processing AA took over years ago. :D Now only few games support it without driver forcing, Witcher 2 and Metro LL to name a few.


TS, Witcher 2, while pretty, is not particularly that demanding with above disabled. I never noticed any lag with mine, maxed out and all. There's got to be something else wrong, in your drivers maybe.
 
MaZa said:
Ubersampling is just fancy name for super sampling antialiasing. That mofo needs power. There is a reason why MSAA and now post processing AA took over years ago. :D Now only few games support it without driver forcing, Witcher 2 and Metro LL to name a few
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I always enable 2x Super-Sampling in my Nvidia Control Panel for every game without any issues...so ubersampling is the same thing just that it's enabled within the game itself versus via the CP?...in that case I shouldn't have any issues at my resolution
 
Game just seems to run for crap. On low I can barely get it to 60ish FPS in the main game, and it drops below that plenty. Now I'd be fine with lower FPS but the interface is laggy even at 60, and below that it gets even worse.

Just not very well coded, it would seem. Unfortunately, it is really a deal breaker for me. I find that it doesn't "feel" right and it breaks my immersion.
 
Sycraft said:
Game just seems to run for crap. On low I can barely get it to 60ish FPS in the main game, and it drops below that plenty. Now I'd be fine with lower FPS but the interface is laggy even at 60, and below that it gets even worse.

Just not very well coded, it would seem. Unfortunately, it is really a deal breaker for me. I find that it doesn't "feel" right and it breaks my immersion.
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Runs fine for me. I can run high settings at 1080P and keep bw 60-100fps.

Might try re-installing the game.
 
Sycraft said:
Game just seems to run for crap. On low I can barely get it to 60ish FPS in the main game, and it drops below that plenty. Now I'd be fine with lower FPS but the interface is laggy even at 60, and below that it gets even worse.

Just not very well coded, it would seem. Unfortunately, it is really a deal breaker for me. I find that it doesn't "feel" right and it breaks my immersion.
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Not the game's coding Sycraft. Game runs fine on the highest settings for me as long as Ubersampling is off. Got a conflict or something else happening. Try reinstalling your video card drivers, setting your sound card to 44Hz, or try something else. If launching it through Steam, try checking the files for consistency. MAybe your AV thinks it's a virus or is scanning your system for viruses? Trust us when we say that you shouldn't have a problem as people with your setup are running it without problems.

Please don't take what I said in a negative way. Just saying troubleshoot a bit before you write the game off as it runs great for most of us. :)
 
Disable v-sync. It is pretty much broken in W2

It's still not 100% lag free, but disabling v-sync was the single most noticeable setting change to reduce lag in Witcher 2.
 
Yeah give the game some effort. It is awesome after all. It should run fine on your system. There is something weird going on.
 
So it looks like prerendered frames is the culprit for the lag. I have it set to just do as the application wishes in the nVidia control panel, since that has always worked. However forcing it to 1 for the Witcher 2 seems to fix the lag problem. Now, even with lower FPS, the interface is still responsive, as I'd expect. So if anyone has a similar problem, at least on an nVidia card, give that a shot, see if it helps. Didn't change framerate at all (you wouldn't expect it to, expect to perhaps lower it a bit) but made it responsive.

Still doesn't get much in the way of high FPS, like 40ish on high at 2560 and maybe 60ish on high at 1920, but with the interface lag fixed, it is perfectly playable.

Looking at benchmarks it looks like the performance is as expected. I stand by my earlier assertion: The engine isn't very good. It runs slow given the quality of the visuals (not that they are bad, but I've seen better, faster). Also it is clearly requesting too many prerendered frames, making its interface laggy, even at 60fps. Also there is no reason for a game to want administrator access to run every time.

Also cageymaru, suggesting trying random things really isn't helpful. When you are troubleshooting, you need to understand what something might change before trying it, or it isn't likely to help. For example changing the sample rate on a soundcard doesn't do anything with programs that use DirectSound, Xaudio, etc since they do not access the hardware and everything flows through Window's resampling engine. Only pro APIs like WDM/KS and ASIO bypass it. So while that would be a valid thing to try in the event someone is having sound trouble, as a general troubleshooting step it is chasing chimera.
 
polonyc2 said:
I always enable 2x Super-Sampling in my Nvidia Control Panel for every game without any issues...so ubersampling is the same thing just that it's enabled within the game itself versus via the CP?...in that case I shouldn't have any issues at my resolution
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If you are talking about transparency antialiasing that is a different thing. That is an enhancement for the MSAA that is unable to smooth alpha textures and special effects on its own. I think these days SSAA has to be forced with Nvidia Inspector and such if the game doesnt have a support for it natively.

True SSAA renders the image in much higher resolution and then downscales it to your actual resolution and smooths the jaggies using the information gathered from the high resolution render. It antialiases everything and looks amazing, but as you can guess its a performance hog. Think of it as putting a multi-display load (a little exaggeration as there is no wide FOV load on top) on your single 1080p screen rig.
 
The Witcher 2 is one of the few games you can't just enable/boost everything to the max with top-notch hardware. Ubersampling is still a killer, although you can likely max the game out and get 50fps with it disabled.
The game is never particularly "fast" but I'm not sure I'd ever call it laggy. It reminds me a bit of Dark Souls, which is also a slower paced game, although I wish the Witcher had more defensive mechanics beyond rolling around.
Hopefully the pre-rendered frames was the culprit there. After I started using a framerate limiter I haven't had need for that toggle, although it was a lifesaver in the past.
 
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I always turn the prerendered frames to 1 or 2 globally. Its an old fix for some instances of mouse lag and never encountered any problems/side effects so far either.
 
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