Does anyone else experience this? My game runs ok on DX12, a bit of stuttering but otherwise playable at least with RTX on but every session after a random amount of time the game just drops to 2-5fps and I need to force close and restart the game to fix. Happens in White Orchard, Velen, Kaer Morhen... does not seem to be location dependent. Anyone know of a fix or anything I can try?

I have tried:
-Updating Nvidia Drivers
-Switching to DLSS 2.5.0 dlls
-Uninstalling the game, deleting all game folders and graphics settings files and reinstalling the game
-Applying the new Hotfix
-Disabling full screen optimizations in compatibility and running the exe as admin
-Lowering the graphics settings and switching DLSS off
-Turning GOG/Steam overlay off

Nothing is working, I still get the same freezing after 15-30 minutes every time I play.

System Specs:
AMD Ryzen 5800x3D
RTX 3080
32GB DDR4 RAM at 3600mhz
Corsair MP600 1TB m.2 SSD

Someone suggested on the Steam Forums that it could be hardware temperature related:

I just ran a new session for about 20 minutes and recorded temps the whole time, they honestly don't seem very bad. And the current values you see in my screenshot are at the time of the FPS drop and they are lower than the max temps I was seeing during the session.

CPU seems to be running around 50-60c and GPU seems to be running around 55-65c. The GPU memory did get up to 90c at one point but at the time of the crash in FPS was only at about 74c. Seems pretty low to be experiencing any throttling.

Edit: GOG is not allowing me to link my imgur image of HWmonitor for temps. But max CPU core temp was 62.6C and max GPU temp was 77C. GPU memory reached 90C once but at time of crash was at 74C. No alarming temps present that would suggest throttling to me.

Did some more digging. Something is causing GPU utilization to spike right when the freezing happens. 3D and Video Encode jump from 10-30% utilization to 100% right as the freezing happens each time.

I have imgur screenshots of the usage spikes but this forum won't let me post or attach them. But in Task Manager Performance under GPU the 3D and Video Encode sections are around 20-30% just walking through Oxenfurt and then as soon as the frame drop/crash happens both these sections spike to 100% utilization. Something is causing the GPU usage to go crazy every 15 or so minutes of gameplay.

Did a few more play sessions on lower settings to see if lower VRAM usage affected the freezing and it did not. Even using only 7-8GB of VRAM and after about 10-15 minutes of gameplay would experience the drop in FPS to 2 and game would not recover. Observed the same GPU utilization symptoms. 3D and Video Encode would jump from around 20-30% utilization to pinned at 100% as soon as the freezing started.

Let me start off that I don't currently play this game and I don't have a recent nvidia card, but the video encode process is very suspicious to me.

Do you maybe have a gameplay capture option enabled somewhere? Is shadowplay set to save a video file or record a certain duration of video? It vaguely sounds like there's an encode process running somewhere that maybe has a buffer that fills up and then tries to get the encoding output completed, but can't because the game is so heavy on the cpu/gpu that it just chokes in the high workload.

This has not yet been suggested on the Steam forums discussion that I opened about this same issue. But interesting thought. I do have Nvidia overlay which does record gameplay for the last 5 minutes or so as I am playing. I never really use it so I forgot about it. I will disable this, run a few sessions, and report back in a couple hours.

Nope, this did not fix the issue. Disabled Nvidia overlay and started a new session. Exactly 15 minutes into the session GPU usage spiked to 100% from around 20-30% and fps dropped to 1 frame per second. Game did not recover and had to force close.

This time though, the GPU Encode usage stayed at 0% in performance tab.

Interesting note, I was working so just started the session at exactly 6:00 and left Geralt just standing in Velen, no gameplay. Game froze to 1fps and GPU usage spiked at exactly 6:15.

Were you able to fix this issue then. I seem to be having the same issue for the last month or so and have tried everything.

Does this occur in any other game you play? Have you tested doing the same 30+ minute session? Seems to be unrelated to Witcher 3 by the description, more of a hardware issue or otherwise unrelated I suspect.