I agree - you alright. The problem is in DX11 comatibility. So to all who can't play i just say - go to the shop for a new graphic card. I suppose maybe time ago some handcrafts will find the way to play with old cards but for today it' impossible.
I watched the video about hd4400 and even try to use the method of optimisation. Nothing happens to good. It says to me - that DX11 compability is a primary way to get this game launch properly)

I don't know why my posts disappeared from a similar topic in the Witcher 3 forum, but I'm still have the black screen / no start issue.

I've tried everything I've read on the forum, and the only thing that made a difference was rolling back the NVidia driver to the 9/2014. The game was poorly playable, but it at least launched. The new driver just causes it to hang indefinitely. Unfortunately, I have not been able to replicate the scenario. It'd be nice to at least get word on why this occurs or how to work around this.

Win 7/Pro/x64
i7 5500 / 2.4 GHz
16GB Ram
850M GTX / 4GB

Are you saying that you have the same specs?

Otherwise, your post is completely unhelpful. Of course it works fine for a lot of people.

Recent purchaser of the game on disk and ran into the same problem as the OP pointed out: executable starts and seems to be booting up, black screen, then the dreaded "The Witcher 3 has stopped working" and CTD.

In terms of existing hardware specs, I admit my laptop isn't great by any stretch:

HP Pavillion 15 Notebook (I know, I know, but it's all I've got!)
Windows 8 - x64 bit OS version installed
8GB RAM - 7.73GB usable
Intel Core i7-4702MQ 2.20 GHz (where I usually find myself falling down)
Intel HD Graphics 4600 & AMD Radeon HD 8600M
DirectX 11 installed

But I have been able to run other resource-hungry games in the past by ramming every graphical option down to Low, then fiddle with it until I find an acceptable balance between performance and graphical detail.

According to the Event Logs (I gave a shot at starting Witcher 3 a few times to treble-check), this might be the culprit in my case:

Faulting Application: witcher3.exe, ver. 3.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x55557f2ae
Faulting Module Path: C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\igdusc64.dll, ver. 9.18.10.3055, time stamp: 0x5137cab9
Exception Code 0xc0000005

The remaining codes vary across the board, but that is the bottom line across all three event reports.

I suspect that patching of Galaxy (which got interrupted after the initial 3MB update - now I need 47MBs more, by accounts!) might have something to do with it, so I'll restart the patching process and see if anything does finally work afterwards. Failing that, a general driver overhaul might be in order, as I last performed an update around February.

I hope that what information I have provided can help nut this out - or a more technical-minded gamer then I am can use this information - but, I guess I'll have to fall back to the old refrain of "this comp isn't capable of running it".

I think there is a problem with this driver and DirectX11. Some people had the same crashes with GTA V, forcing it to the DX10 render path (per ini-edit) fixed this, but I don't know if this is possible with TW3

Yeah, sounds right. A quick check turns up that the referred-to module is the Unified Shader Compiler extension for the Int. 4600 HD driver.

Great. Best A$80 recently spent.

UPDATE:

EUREKA!! It started and I'm in the main menu!

For future reference: for anyone who is running a similar set-up to mine, go to your driver control panel and set the Witcher 3 executable to 'High Performance' or equivalent. THEN start the executable (GOG Games\The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt\bin\x64\witcher3.exe) as an administrator.

In my case, my guess was it "bypassed" the Intel 4600 and tasked the graphics processing to the Radeon.

Now, lets se what it is like in gameplay proper. Wish me luck!

Hey,
I'm trying to work out how to do this? how do I set the Witcher 3 executable to 'High Performance'? I'm looking everywhere?

thanks

Glad this worked for ya. I'd already tried this with mine, but it still does the black screen. :(

At least in Win7, if you right click your Desktop and select the Nvidia Control Panel, you can choose which processor is used on a per game profile basis.

In some cases you can right click and select which processor to run an exe with

Well meaby it's an overkill, but i had formated my C: partition with windows 7 , then installed windows 10(among other drivers, directX) and witcher 3 is loading up now. However galaxy was cousing some troubles so i had to rename galaxy.dll from witcher's folder and open witcher3.exe directly, but it worked for me and i can finally play.

I have laptop lenovo Z500 with geforce 740M.

I had the same issue...Installed just fine, when I clicked on play nothing would happen, the game would not launch, no error messages. Just...nothing. I followed the advice on here and uninstalled Galaxy then reinstalled it. Now it's acting like I never spent 3+ hours waiting for it to download and is reinstalling. If I try to open the game in the folder (which I did before and it would take me to Galaxy and it wouldn't play as stated before), now I get the following error:

"The version of this file is not compatible with the version of Window your'e running. Check your computer's system information to see whether you need an x86 (32-bit) or x64 (64-bit) version of the program, and then contact the software publisher."

What happened? Do I have to sit through the install again?!

I know next to nothing about computers, I just want to play this #$&^@ game and I've had nothing but issues since I bought it. Can anyone help (and if you need info, just tell me how to get it). I'm using Windows 7, have 8 GB of RAM, a 32-bit operating system. Not sure what other info is needed to help me.

Thank you!

Did the developers make a 32 bit version or update? i thought it required a 64 bit but i might be behind on news.

Well I assumed that if I had all the system requirements it would install. I guess I am wrong then? Like I said, I just bought the game because my friend built this computer and said it would work and kept raving about it, so I don't know much about computers except that if I don't have the right requirements it wouldn't work? Ugh.

I'm also unable to start the game after playing it yesterday with no issues.

Win 7 x64
Nvidia 970 4GB (3.5)
Newest drivers
12GB RAM
Core i7

Double click EXE & nothing happens

What I've tried with zero success:
Reboot
Remove & reinstall game
Downgrade Nvidia drivers
Set affinity on EXE to all cores
Ran EXE as Admin

Nothing is working here....

You might want to ask support on how to enable logging (if there isn't any already) and take a peek at what might be going on. Is there space on the drive on which you installed it?

Try updating your Motherboard's BIOS and making sure you have the latest video drivers from nVidia (they release a new one within the past couple weeks). Make sure you have the latest DirectX 11 installed. For example, my motherboard BIOS was updated this past month as were the nVidia drivers. I upgraded both before playing.

Maybe you have some anti-virus installed that's working overtime or maybe it's been infected by a virus.

Just a few streams of thought, hopefully it is not something insurmountable as it sounds like your rig should be able to handle the game.