Just in case all you AMD card users aren't aware, there's a Beta 15.5 driver update specially crafted for W3.
I'm on a sub min specs rig (CPU i3-4130) & it's made a small difference to the strain on both my CPU & GPU. :)

Really old news, but yeah AMD users should update for a performance boost on some systems. Personally I've seen a small-ish (maybe about 12%) fps increase on Radeon HD 7770 OC.
Thanks OP

I actually didn't know that was out. Thanks, gonna go grab it.

The Beta driver introduced some micro stutters where there wasn't in my rig... had to rollback to be able to play smoothly again... I'm not saying it will happen to everyone, but if you are already having a nice experience with the game's performance, maybe the driver it's not needed.

Thanx Bleed, I didn't know it was really old. Once again, my raptr let me down, telling me I had the latest driver when I didn't & when I tried to get it to find this 'really old' 15.5 driver, it still failed, so I had to install it manually! That's why I thought to post a thread about it. :) Thanx Argranati, good point. I haven't played much since updating my driver, so I'll see how it runs. I was interested in it to hopefully take some strain off my poor rig, which has been running at 100% useage on both CPU & GPU. Temps ok tho. :)

Well by old I mean like 56 something hours, but by guru3d's and amd forums, it's old, and if you consider the people there were already counting every second for it's release, much like this forums anticipated 1.05 patch -- i mean people were going nuts, so yeah, it's (was) a big deal.

Anyways, hope it's gonna help some people, thanks for the heads up again.

So, W3's crashed 3 times this evening! Might not be such a good driver update then. :)
I'll maybe try playing with the settings a bit before reverting to the older driver. Hard to believe that AMD could make a driver specifically geared for W3 that causes crashes. :)

Since using 15.5 drivers I've had a few crashes (ie if I play for 4 hours, I may get 1 crash if im unlucky) and like ARGRANATI said "some micro stutters but I've also been able to increase some of my game settings, so I guess its a fair trade off.

I've tested only an hour so far but there was a noticeable improvement, enough so that I bumped SSAO up to HBAO+.

Glad you bought that up MM. I tried looking into the difference & it seems to be more of an Nvidia thing than AMD.
I did see some forum posts where people were saying it can apply to AMD cards, but it was developed by Nvidia so...
I'm using SSAO currently but might try it to see any difference.

Yeah it is an nVidia feature, i'm not sure if the engine is just using the AMD method (HDAO) when you set it to HBAO+, but it does have an improvement on visual quality at the expense of a few frames.

Thanx MM. Sounds like I should set it for HBAO+ then. It figures, coz raptr optimise always wants to use it too.
Thanx CC. I will give it a go. I'm pretty confident in my little ol CPU, but if I can do anything to help it, I will. :)

You're welcome ;)
Well, I too have a pretty weak CPU, Phenom II X6 1045T but I cranked it up to run all 6 cores @3780 Mhz with the Northbridge running @2800 Mhz. It now packs a pretty good punch and is not a bottleneck for my R9 290 anymore, somewhere the level of a 1090T. I guess that's why I didn't get any performance boost out of these drivers. But I'd guess that everything below a 1090T would get a pretty neat performance boost out of it and everything below a R9 290 as well. Let me know if it worked for you. Oh, and btw, if the 1036 driver version causes your game to crash or not even start, try 1023. Worked for me in terms of not crashing the game that is :D. Just copy the dlls into the folder where you can find the witcher3.exe and give it a go.

Thanx CaptainCrunch83, it seems to be working for my rig.
It's a bit hard to tell exactly, coz I discovered the 'multi core enhancement' in my Mobo's UEFI was disabled, so I've enabled that too. I've got a Sapphire R9 270X btw. Since installing the Nexus patchlett, I'm using 1% less on both CPU & GPU, but more importantly, I'm getting 5c + less on my CPU cores max temp. The Sapphire's got some pretty neat cooling, so it's never run hot. I've switched from the SSAO to the HBAO+ too & the game's running as well as ever. So, all in all, a result! :)