Ooh, those are high requirements! Looks like this one is out of the cards for me.

Well, I meet the system requirements in all phases besides graphics card. I have a 2gb 7850 where the game requires a 7870.

I guess I'll wait to get The Witcher 3 until I build a new rig either (much) later this year or next year.

holy crap, the minimum requirements are really high, well its back to watching playthroughs

Time for me to build a beefy PC, then.

Any one got a suggestion how I can build a rig that will meet the requirements on a budget?

Sorry, my bad, thought it was a desktop PC! ;)

Probably the new GTX 960/965 which is supposed to be launching in a week in 15 january and the rumored price seems to be 200USD.

Ehh.. guess it's time to upgrade this year. My S775 mobo from 2007 and a C2D E8400 is really getting old school.
(I have a Win7 partition just for "special" games like TW3 in case they don't appear for Linux)

I am more than ready to play this on maximum. :D

It's how i feared... I am not playing the witcher 3. At this point it is probably the only game i will not be able to run and I am not upgrading for one game not even for the witcher 3. I will be upgrading my pc in a year or two...

Well, it seems I'll play it maxed out. Eventually...if the PC version is optimized...

Damn. I'm close, so it will depend on if "minimum" really means "minimum to play the game at all" or just minimum for 1080p, 30FPS, medium settings. If not, it looks like I won't get to play it for a while. I just hit the CPU requirement, and I've got 8GB of RAM, but I've got a 560Ti and they want a 660.

Very nice! I feel ready for this.

Update: (for those who might stumble upon this while pondering whether or not their system can handle The Witcher 3)
Despite my assumptions that the game probably would not work out very well on my Radeon HD7850 below, I bought the game anyway and the game runs fantastic with minimal graphic loss. I had to lower the resolution to 1920x1200 and back off foilage visibility range and grass density, and disable ambient occlusion and Hairworks. I get 26FPS on average and can bring it up over 30FPS easily by making a few other slight mods but I find 26FPS to be fine compared to most other games so I'm living with it. I find Motion Blur being enabled helps to give an illusion of a smoother framerate also. Most graphics options in the game have no noticeable affect on framerate, they did an amazing job optimizing this game, it runs better than many triple A titles from 2 years ago.

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Original post:

AMD FX8350, 32GB, 2GB Radeon HD7850 here which I built brand new in Feb 2013. At the time, the Radeon 7850 GPU was the most popularly sold GPU in terms of units sold. According to Steam's hardware statistics page it remained the most popular GPU in use up until a few months ago when it got bumped down. Seems crazy to release a new game and have one of the most popular video cards deployed out there be below the minimum system requirements IMHO.

The last time I bought a newly released game at full price was in 2006 and to date no game has made me so eager to get it right away when it is released than The Witcher 3. I've been highly interested in several games but not to the same degree of anticipation I have for The Witcher 3.

I've had to drop a few 3D settings down slightly or back off my resolution to 1920x1200 on maybe 3 games in 2 years to avoid some low frame rates at certain places in a few titles, but the difference in visual was almost unnoticeable. I'm hoping that The Witcher 3 gets further optimization to make it playable on the Radeon HD7850 on a system that otherwise meets or beats the recommended system configuration, or that a game demo is available to test it on to see if it is playable before purchase as I just can't justify spending $300-400 on a new GPU just for a single video game. It'll probably be 2 years from now until there are enough games that I want that need newer video hardware before I can justify spending the money. Also, the price of video hardware has not come down at all in the last 2 years (here in Canada anyway) and in some cases has went up slightly - further reason to not buy new video hardware.

This is somewhat of a bummer as I was tremendously anticipating buying the pre-order slightly before release and playing it as soon as it is available, and now I may not even get to see it for a few years.

I'm hopelessly addicted to Skyrim at the moment, and was addicted to Mount & Blade before that though so I can probably ride out a couple of years with current and older RPGs I guess. By the time I have video hardware to support The Witcher 3 it'll probably be up for sale for $4.99 in GOG seasonal promos, or maybe a promo freebie for Cyberpunk 2077's release in 2016 or whenever.

Then again a lot can change in 3 months time, including the game being delayed further (it happens...), so I'll hope for the best and wait and see what happens I suppose.

On the upside, Skyrim is absolutely massive not even including the DLC, and now I want to play the prior 4 games in The Elder Scrolls series also, as well as go through Warband and Fire & Sword, Ravenshield, Risen 1-3 and a bunch of others. I also have to complete The Witcher 1 and 2 yet too. :)

I hope there's a demo, I hope there's a demo, I hope there's a demo!

Update:
The funny thing about this too, is that Radeon 7850s are still popularly sold enough to warrant a $150-300 price tag even today depending on the retailer. Crazy.
http://www.shopbot.ca/m/?m=Radeon+7850

I don't even want to look at the prices of one of the cards the game requires, they're probably all $800 video cards and you need 4 of them in crossfire/SLI mode. LOL

7950 for 139USD with code SILENTPC:
http://gpushack.com/collections/all-gpus-for-sale/products/msi-r7950-twin-frozr
they cheap

With the current exchange rate, harmonized sales tax, shipping, courier customs broker fees, and customs duty charges that will work out to somewhere around $200+. Ordering from the US to Canada of hardware is a roulette wheel of unknown charges, including the broker fee that shows up unexpected in the mail 3 months after you buy something. :)

Even if it was $139 CAD all in, delivered to my door though, it's more than I'm willing to pay for hardware for one video game though. My budget for video hardware for one video game right now is a free video card showing up on my doorstop in a manger. :)