The Witcher 3 PC benchmarks with Hairworks shows why downgrade was inevitable.

The Witcher 3 benchmarked with Nvidia and AMD GPU's shows why the downgrade from the original version was probably justified.
The results have been taken with and without the Nvidia Hairworks option.

[affrogamer]

Most PCs with the Geforce 980 can't even keep a steady framerate with Nvidia's hairwork addition and you got these PC elitists here crying and blaming consoles for the downgrade. No the downgrade is cuz CDPR realized that even with great optimization, most high end PCs couldn't even handle the quality of the 2013 trailer, plain and simple!

[methegreatone]

1) So why not ditch hairworks, and not downgrade everything else ? A 980gtx performs incredibly well without hairworks on. Hairworks is taking away b/w 10 to 20 fps !

2)Not sure if you know this, but the patch actually upped the graphics quality on PC. Better detail, draw distance etc etc. In other words - they already upgraded it, so performance is going to be slightly worse. A website comparing the two said that the difference was like an extra graphics setting.

3) CDPR are not stupid mate, they've made 2 PC games earlier. You really think what they were targetting on PC was soooo beyond current hardware ? It's funny, I remember them teasing all those detailed graphics for TW2 in pre alpha. It actually came out with better graphics. The downgrade on TW3 was mostly because of consoles, and that's only common sense.

4)"most high end PCs couldn't even handle the quality of the 2013 trailer"
Same story with TW2. Did that ruin the game or something ? No. Instead, because of that, people enjoy it to this day and it still looks good. Options. If the PC version has options for these things, then who cares if no one can run it maxed ? They'll do that a few years down the line.

Anyway. Play the game without hairworks and the game still looks great anyway. Not bashing the game here, only arguing against what you said :P

[MWH]

"Options. If the PC version has options for these things, then who cares if no one can run it maxed ? They'll do that a few years down the line."

^this.
thank you.

[guyman]

Well said

[nveenio]

I've been playing just fine with Hairworks on and everything at max, and I'm playing on a 770.

[comebackkid9891]

I'd comment but the sensitive snowflake master race will target my bubbles ;)

[darkslayer208]

stop your nonsense if Xbone And Ps4 can run the game 900p and 1080p with their mid range gpu (1.2 teraflops and 1.84 teraflops respectively ) and with their weak 1.6ghz Amd cpu.
for pc this should not have been a problem to run game with earlier settings nowadays a mid range Gpu has atleast 2.5 teraflop of compute power and cpus are way powerfull than the console to match.And GTX 780 is more than enough to run the game with 2013's settings with Hairworks.
so basically this not nothing but console parity stunts pulled by CDPR..

[uth11]

Its because PC games aren't nearly as well optimized as they are on consoles. Developers like John Carmack have said that PS4 and XB1 would typically perform as well as a PC double their spec due to optimization

[Dynasty2021]

No.

The downgrade happened because the consoles couldn't cope with the PC version, so they had to make ONE version (that would run on consoles) as they didn't have the time or resources or personelle to make more than one version of the game.

So...it's 100% because of consoles that the game was downgraded.

And I'm sorry, but PC elitists are being very, VERY quickly overtaken by console elitists.

"All PC gamers care about is graphics."

Oh, hypocrite much? Have you seen the Uncharted 4 comment section of any article related to Uncharted 4? Wake up.

[comebackkid9891]

If consoles vanished tomorrow all of your games would become f2p.

[starchild]

The thing is, the more and more I play and see of the game the more I realize there hasn't been much of a downgrade. Certainly not a game-wide downgrade. Some things have even been upgraded. Most of the changes that have been made are not anything that can be called a technical downgrade. Most of them are just stylistic or artistic changes. Then you have time of day and weather differences between certain screenshots, and that really seems to throw off a lot of people.

Here are some comparisons showing what I'm talking about. Top shots in each comparison are from older trailers/demos and the bottom shots are from the final game.

http://i.imgur.com/6Krh5iT....
http://i.imgur.com/HlyJxGP....

http://i.imgur.com/SLbyM69....
http://i.imgur.com/Lj4mfbO....

http://i.imgur.com/vhI9fbJ....
http://i.imgur.com/1TwK7ua....

http://i.imgur.com/5nIF64E....
http://i.imgur.com/IOj3ASn....

http://i.imgur.com/Q1GyXYy....
http://i.imgur.com/noKtOPQ....

http://i.imgur.com/xPuwdJg....
http://i.imgur.com/yy6hs8n....

http://i.imgur.com/RpON1PD....
http://i.imgur.com/01KOesN....

http://i.imgur.com/vmhNrHE....
http://i.imgur.com/JsC7zN2....

http://i.imgur.com/CXIbyxQ....
http://i.imgur.com/gvgzNPv....

http://i.imgur.com/z18lt6t....
http://i.imgur.com/lG2GVlo....

http://i.imgur.com/dV0yGtW....
http://i.imgur.com/twy7lhP....

http://i.imgur.com/oPoByum....
http://i.imgur.com/x56KET8....

[methegreatone]

Oh, yes, definitely. The game probably looks better in many ways !

The downgrade is definitely not as big as some have been claiming . I remember back in the 35 minute demo, which I think could have been from a build that looked just as good as VGX, people kept saying downgrade for that. The comparisons they made were laughable. Completely different locations, time of day, angle, everything.
Comparing close ups to sweeping shots and comparing texture quality ? lol.

It's definitely there though, as can be seen in the grass, the removal of reflections altogether from swamp water water and puddles. Blood decals are hardly there anymore, and as much as devs say that's a bug, I can bet it's because they toned it down for performance. No blood on water either - that's removed too, because of the changes to water, all for performance.
Building tesselation was also removed, and lots of other things you can notice.

[FastRedPonyCar]

It's the overly colorful look of the retail build that annoys me. I'm sure I can use something like sweet fx or whatever to tone down the color saturation but overall, some stuff looks better and some stuff looks a bit worse.

Time of day differences in the comparison pictures make it a little harder for some to accurately compare.

[kraenk12]

Actually CDP RED already stated that they simply couldn't work on two different versions due to budget and small team size. Prepare for the inevitable enhanced edition on PC :P

[zidane1341]

Yeah cuz that wouldn't piss off people that already bought it. Not to mention they already UPDATED the pcs graphics. So your funny.

[Kenshin_BATT0USAI]

I feel like people like you don't understand how computers work, so just in case there are more than 1 of you I'll point this out.

With pcs, you can CHANGE the parts within them. If a graphic preset is too much to handle right now, it probably won't be with the next set of graphics cards.
I.e. I remember ubersampling KILLING framerate on pcs when witcher 2 came out. Now? It's a joke.

[Perjoss]

I dunno man, played it for a while last night and it looked jaw dropping with everything fully maxed @ 1600p.

[Lev1903]

People have to complain about everything. Specially some pc gamers who thinks that they are the master race.

[ninsigma]

Getting bored of this master race crap. It's just become entitlement!

[MWH]

it's people thinking and talking like you forces this sentiment. yes there are idiots in both camps but this is not about mastery it's about options and credibility. can you get that?

[Lev1903]

No No, me talking about master race doesnt force anything. You know what forces the sentiment? people calling other people peasents because they prefer a console above a pc.

You see how pc gamers react because some pixels were different then 3 years ago and then go on harrasing the developers and the console users because somehow they got the bad side of the deal.

There are idiots on both camps. But the most loud idiots are coming from the deluded Master Race. Console users dont harras developers for some pixels and options;)

[methegreatone]

Yeah, whatever said and done, if you have a good rig, this game should look great.

[darksky]

The benchmarks show that even a top pc with a gtx 970 can't get past 45fps on ultra without Hairworks turned on. In effect a near top end pc is barely faster than a ps4 in this game, unless you have SLI/Crossfire cards.

[Kenshin_BATT0USAI]

Well that simply isn't true at all. I have everything on ultra and hairworks off(let's face it hairworks doesn't even look great) and I'm getting a solid 60fps at 1080p.

[ninjahunter]

There's definitely a technical issue somewhere the performance gap between high and ultra settings is insane, yet both settings look almost identical.

I can play this game on a 750TI on high and 90% of the time it will look identical to a 970 that is getting the same framerate on ultra settings. The sick joke is, a 970 is 2.5x more powerful than a 750ti.

[T900]

There is no difference between high textures and ultra textures. However if you load Ultra Textures then more textures are loaded on to your GPU.

This results in less pop ins, however if your GPU has less VRAM then it will start stuttering. So for people below 3GB of VRAM its recommended to keep high settings, this wont lower the graphics it just may cause popins. If you GPU has the VRAM then by all means keep ultra.

[xTheMercenary_]

That recommended vram stuff is a load of crap. I've got a gtx 780 everything on ultra except for shadows and gameworks turned off and getting 40-60 averaging roughly low 50's and the vram has never gone over 2gb.

[KrystofKage1]

I was well above the minimum requirements, but it was stuttering and struggled to stay above 30fps. Played around with the settings, even used the nvidia experience settings, no luck.

Picked up the ps4 version, I think I'll wait next time instead of preordering PC games.

[T900]

What GPU do you have?

[MoeStedley]

You have zero friends.

(its a South Park quote calm down kids)