+1 my thoughts exactly.

The minimum and recommended requirements are quite tough. I completely agree. It means my three year old computer is definitely not able to play it (something I did not anticipate). This means I do not need to buy it right away but can wait until I buy a new computer which is scheduled for end of year, beginning of next year. This means that I will not buy TW3 for large price but probably for less than half price (6-12 months after release) and they will make less money because of too high requirements.

On the other hand TW3 is supposed to look and play much better than TW2 to compensate for the high requirements. But my impression from the gameplay videos is that the graphical look is actually not that much better. It's refined and may look even greater on screens with large resolutions but my first impression was disappointment.

I guess that nowadays with increased computational power you do not significantly improve graphical quality to give it a more real feeling like you used to. Advances are much more gradual now and they come at a very large price of high demands on equipment and I wonder if in the end it is really worth it.

Hope for a good story then.

Eventhough there are gaming laptops that can run demanding games they are quite costly and always behind high end gaming desktops in terms of raw performance. Whenever you decide to purchase your next computer and need any assistance then just create a new thread here as CharlesGrey mentioned and lots of people would be willing to help you choose a capable system to handle games like The Witcher 3. :)

One of the other problems with NVidia is their numbering system. It's not only the first digit that counts. The second has a big role in the power of the GPU. In fact, I'd almost say the second digit means much more. The first digit is essentially the generation, so 800's are fairly recent. That second digit is the capability within that generation. So while the 840M is a fairly recent CPU, its an economy GPU in the 800 series.

Just for fun I was curious what a desktop PC with the recommended settings would cost me currently:

Intel Core i7-3770 Box, LGA1155 = $362
8 GB-Kit Kingston 1600MHz DDR3 CL9 DIMM = $88
HIS R9 290X iPower IceQ X2 = $429

plus the frame around it:
ASRock B75M-GL R2.0, Sockel 1155, mATX = $71
Compucase 400W black = $75
SanDisk X110 128GB = $77
WD Green 1TB, SATA 6Gb/s (WD10EZRX) = $74

makes = $1176

This is not very cheap for a hobby. I wonder if they will find enough people actually having the recommended hardware? Who wants to play on minimal settings?

Well I upgraded my parts last week as well after 3 years.
GPU: ASUS DirectCU II OC R9290 (for €279 which was on sale and it's really cheap for the performance you'll get)
CPU: Intel® Core™ i5-4690K, 3,5 GHz (€279): This one was a expensive bastard (but that's the case with all intel/Nvidia items). I planned to buy a 8 cores AMD cpu but after research I learned that it's not optimal for gaming or single core apps in general.
PSU: Cooler Master G750M (€89 which is a great price for a 750 watt, psu with semi modular/hasbro ready psu)
Mobo: GIGABYTE GA-Z97-HD3 (€107 is really a good price for a double bios Z97 mobo)

The rest I didn't really care to replace.

Also sold my older parts for 250€
an i5-4690K is a great cpu and you don't really need an i7 core for gaming. (unless you do a lot of rendering, video making.
Also a R9 290 is really a good gpu, runs most demanding games on ultra and is 100-200$ cheaper than a 290x.

Why pay more for things that you won't even use :p

Compucase 400W black is a case with a 400W max PSU? If so, not a good enough for this composition especially when 290X occassionaly reaches 300W when pushed. And usually 400W max =300W continuous. So, for this build at least a "silver" (efficiency close to 90%) having 500-550W continuous is required. So, add another $30-50 just for the case as $75 is barely enough for such a PSU.

All in all, I just wish Witcher 3 will be optimised enough to take good and balanced use of 4-6 cores of CPU and not too biased on GPU area because of devs working with nVidia. Or else devs will take the stick by many players having high end CPUs and being forced to play in medium settings...

The 290X is fantastic at that pricepoint, especially if you do crypto-mining on the side. I was kinda surprised at how energy efficient it was; considering Maxwell's high energy efficiency only to find there was less than 40W difference at max load. You can use it to bruteforce through Nvidia biased games and put it to mine at night!

Yeah, it's very confusing if you're not the type to always keep track of new hardware developments. Took me a while to understand just what their GPU names really mean, in terms of processing power. Not transparent and customer friendly at all; but then, I suspect that wasn't the point to begin with. They probably sell a large number of GPUs based primarily on the fact that the average customer doesn't fully understand what they're buying.

I thought they had reversed situations; GTX 970 for example seems quiet light when it comes to power consumption as opposed to the R9 2xx series.

GTX 970s vs 290s; 970s are baws. But 980 and 290 have around only a 40W difference in power consumption. This bench shows mixed results http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1439?vs=1442 with both having similar power consumption when idle and running the FurMark becnhmark but 290X being 70W higher when loading C3. I'll post more tomorrow; since google searches when sleepy often lead to nightmares.

I have spent much time these last days reading tests and rewiews, and I feel that I have learned a lot about CPUs and GPUs. I want to learn about motherboards. RAM and cooling next. and screens, and... It is fun, and confusing. But mostly fun :-)
Will check out youtube as well when the time comes

yup, the numbering is confusing. can I ask if you have a link to an article that explains more about that? Id love to read more

I don't have an article on it, but what I do is go by Benchmark charts like this one...
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

Even if it isn't perfect, it gives an idea where you might be at. That site also ranks CPUs.

Figure you can look at the chart, compare what you have to the official requirements and see if you have a decent chance of running a game.