And there is a helluva lot of tweaking options! I mean Dear God:

Advanced Configuration Options:
-Downscale textures factor applies texture downscale. Larger values cause far worse texture quality.
-Texture memory budget on graphic card for textures. The larger value, the less streaming game will need (and will run more fluently), but it can cause graphics card to run out of memory and even game crash, so keep those values reasonable and set according to graphics card memory.
-Texture time budget
- Quality of shadows, self-explanatory, affects graphics performance
and is consuming GPU, doesn't affect CPU
- Quality of shadowed lights, ust maximal amount of lights with shadows, affects graphics performance and is consuming GPU, doesn't
affect CPU
- Mesh distance scales LOD distance scale, the smaller value the
less detail models have, but greater performance.
- Bloom, Bloom effect isn't very GPU demanding, but contributes to graphics quality alot.
- Light shafts, "Godrays"/"Lightshafts" effect. Recommended for medium-high/high end machines, turn off on older.
- Antialiasing, Postprocess antialiasing - demanding effect that can lower performance, so on medium and low-end machines should be off.
- Blur, Blur and radial blur special effects. Quite demanding but rare effect.
- Depth of field, Gameplay depth of field effect - subtle and only during gameplay, this option doesn't affect DOF in cutscenes.
- Vignette, Doesn't affect performance, and is rather an aesthetic option (creates photographic vignette around screen).
- Rain, rain wet surfaces effect, affects performance a bit
- SSAO, Screen Space Ambient Occlusion, one of the lighting effects, important to our game (but also unfortunately GPU demanding).
- Motion Blur, Motion blur effect when moving camera, GPU demanding.
- Scatter DoF enables filmic, movie-like bokeh depth of field effect in cutscenes and dialogs. Extremely detailed, but extremely power-demanding. Run on machines with best graphic cards.
- Cutscene DoF depth of field effect, only on cutscenes and dialogs, doesn't affect gameplay performance (only during cutscenes).
- Dynamic Bone Limits, character physics like Geralt's hair animation limiter. Leaving it off is CPU heavy
- Uber sampling is a high quality rendering mode, where the whole scene is rendered multiple times to give best possible texture and object details and antialiasing (better than antialias and anisotropy even on highest settings). Use with caution, only on top end computers (best possible both GPU and CPU).
- Vertical sync helps to avoid "screen
tearing"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_tearingwhen moving
camera and blinking when there are very quick animations (eg. bright
explosions), but can cause rendering to run a bit slower and small
input lag appear.
- Allow decals, decals like dust or blood on characters. It affects performance on CPU side.

I like how the uber sampling mode sounds :S

Even tho I consider my rig more than capable, it might just be a bit too much.

SSAO is heavy.

That stuff brings my computer to its knees in Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Have to turn it off completely. Frames then go from choppy to clean 60fps... i7 920 OC 3,3ghz GTX 480

Yeah, but did you read that uber sampling explanation:

Uber sampling is a high quality rendering mode, where the whole scene is rendered multiple times to give best possible texture and object details and antialiasing (better than antialias and anisotropy even on highest settings). Use with caution, only on top end computers (best possible both GPU and CPU).

Jesus H Christ..

I will probably turn it off but still want to try it.

Uhh..source?

The game's Steam manual.

I hope there's an auto-detect feature.

I bought a high end tooty-fruity video card, overclocked it to get max fps and with all the bells and whistles it looks like a soft focus lens!! Yea no jaggies but "details (sharpness) sucks.
So I shut all the "features" off.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder (too be honest though my 24" screen is 14" from my face Your eye loses resolution the further away you are).

Moral of this post: "If I want to see a nice movie get a bells and whistles card.. But I just want to see the boogie man and kill shit!!

There is, but you should never use that..you will always get worse results than with tweaking.

In Risen i disabled most "enhancing" features, as they pretty much just blurred out the view and stole from me the beautiful, crisp landscape views.

Even higher FPS and a more beautiful game as a result, is king. :)

I'll probably pick up Risen after I'm done with The Witcher 2 (or feel like I need a small pause from it :P)

I've heard good things about it and Risen 2 looks very intriguing.

Im not really counting on my GTX 480 doing this game on max :-)

My 560's first test. Either it works or it dies trying ;)

My hardware is all mixed up though, I've got a dualcore when it's recoomend you use a quad core but then I've got a gtx 260 which just meets the recomeneded settings.

Always prepare for the worst. It may be the next crysis.