DocM: Had more time yesterday to experiment and played up to Velen. While it's not the perfect solution, I found dropping to 1440 res allows for high rtx settings on 3070. I'm not a frame rate counter tho, I just go by what feels good enough.
Anyway I'm happy with it now but it could still be optimized. I'm glad they're looking at it.
On a 3070 / 5600 & I'm averaging around 40-45 FPS with DLSS on balanced & all RT on at 1440p in the fields around Skellige. Even just having RT Global Illumination on drops it from 120FPS right down to 55.
Depending what sort of framerate you're happy with, as it's a 3rd person RPG I find it tolerable on a gamepad, but it's hard to go backwards in FPS when you're used to much smoother performance than this.
Like Cyberpunk, I'm mystified at the lack of customisation when it comes to RT settings, just on or off. No option to scale the RT effects to be at half-res or quarter-res like some games seem to have to make performance more acceptable.
I feel like this is meant for a future generation of cards to make the most of though. Each one of the RT settings makes a definite & noticeable visual difference, but also very noticeable is the shimmering & grainyness of all the fine detail, particularly vegetation, branches, ropes .etc, that violently wave around at high speeds whenever the wind picks up - also for how the camera shakes around whenever Geralt is moving at anything above a walking pace, and really makes anything less than the Quality setting of DLSS feel very soft-focused & shimmery with fine detail invisible unless you stay absolutely still - which the new camera is very reluctant to do.
The mild overhaul to the effects & assets in general is nice enough, though with the new camera putting them under the microscope, and RT bringing performance so far down, it feels like a lot of work resulting in an experience that feels very familiar to playing Witcher 3 on midrange hardware back in 2014, and not in the best way.
