Overclocking doesn't seem to affect the game stability for me at all both cpu and gpu have moderate overclock and the game has never crashed. This game is really stressing the gpu so it could cause a crash if the gpu oc isn't 100% stable under full load but still sounds strange to me if it happens with factory oc especially if you can play other graphically very stressing games without problems.

1.05 patch still doesn't fix anything regarding crashes. Maybe even got it worse as i hear it.

On my GTX 660 OC edition still the only way to play the game 100% stable is underclocking.

I would throw a whole lot of GPU stress tools at it, but I don't know of one that I implicitly trust.

I used to trust OCCT, but since AMD (and Nvidia I think) started implementing automatic downclocking under heavy loads it isn't particularly helpful. In any case this tool is very hard on the GPU and can result in some permanent damage if you're not careful.

Still a couple of ideas come to mind.

*Power supply*
It could be that the current draw from your video card is too much for your power supply to handle. The voltage may be drooping a little too much and so your GPU errors out when at the default clocks. Lowering the voltage decreases the current draw putting less stress on the power suply (and the video card voltage regulators).

Download GPU-Z from here:
http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/

Check out the attached image for instructions, following 1) -> 2) -> 3) -> 4)

The render test is very low stress, the primary reason I suggest using it is to get an idea of the voltage that your graphics card normally works at (otherwise GPU-Z will show the idle voltages when not within a game). If it is an overclocked version the Voltage may be higher but the default GTX660 volts is 1.175v according to this anandtech review:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6276/nvidia-geforce-gtx-660-review-gk106-rounds-out-the-kepler-family/16

So you should see in the VDDC row around 1.175v or perhaps slightly higher depending on how they factory overclocked it.

The trick to seeing if you have a power issue is to see how low this drops when under heavy load.

Notice that there is a red graph to the right of the voltage value?
Every second (you can set it less than that if you want) the GPU-Z application records the voltage and graphs it numerically.

When you open up TW3 leave GPU-Z running in the background (turn off the render test at this point) and play for several minutes. Alt-Tab back to the desktop and move the mouse over the graph, looking for the lower points.

To the left of this, the current voltage that is normally displayed will change to an @ 1.xxxV which will then show you the voltage at that place in the graph. If you find that this is significantly lower than the 1.175v recommended for your card, your power supply may not be providing enough current, or the voltage regulators on the video card itself are under specification (for the given conditions that are required of it). If it is the latter, unless you solder on some new voltage regulators (or perhaps provide better cooling to them), you are probably out of luck.

*Temperature*
Use the same program above to monitor temperatures. When factory overclocked, you would hope that they would consider the worst case situation for airflow and climate, but it may be that they tested the factory overclock up to a temperature that they thought was reasonable (eg 85 degrees).

I'm not looking for improvised solution... Besides i already have one working for me.

I'd like the game to run on it's own... Five patches released fixing anything but stability. What is those fixes for, when the game can't even run without any kind of GPU shenanigans?

I know that's happening only to minority of players. Still their number is alarming enough for CD Project to notice.

What I posted above was not so much as a solution, but a method to help rule out the graphics card as the cause of the instability.

It is something that I have dealt with myself as the Sapphire R9 280X that i'm currently using has inferior Voltage regulators which cause the GPU to throttle under heavy load, therefore delivering less frames. It also means that the GPU is virtually impossible to overclock (massive drop in my voltage under heavy load, ~1V when it should be 1.125V), even 50MHz is too much for it to work at stably.

Since increasing the voltage doesn't help (the voltage regulators can't handle the larger current and so throttle the performance), it actually works out better for me to undervolt the GPU. It reduces what tiny margin of overclock I can obtain to virtually nil, but the reduced load on the voltage regulators means that I don't have the peformance throttled as often when in heavy GPU load games like TW3.

This game is hard on the graphics card system. The only game that comes to mind that I have that runs the GPU this hard is Trine 2 (This is actually how I judged stability for my GPU undervolt). I however have always seen this as a sign that the engine is efficient. It keeps the GPU fed data more often then not, but if there are any defects in your hardware, these games are likely to reveal them.

Here is a post from Frozenbyte describing the GPU overheating problem for Trine 2:
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2264865

Not many games out there will run your GPU as hard as either Trine 2 or TW3. While it may be perfectly stable playing many other games, that isn't necessarily enough of a reason to rule out your GPU without more indepth testing.

Hey Guys,

I'm plagued with that, too. I got the game working for 1-2 days with patch 1.05 after:
- reinstalling NVIDIA Drivers
- underlocked my GPU and GPU MEM clock with NVIDIA Inspector


Since yesterday the game freezes directly after loading ANY savegame.

I'm stuck now - 25% cleared with 45hours played on record. I won't start over again.
Was quite ok until Patch 1.04

Now I'm searching the interwebs and everything, hoping for fixes by CDP and NVIDIA. But first most important things like "Geralt's Equipment not wet anymore after closing inventory" are implemented.

Yeah, I'm becoming grumpy here ...

If you look at the posts concerning crashes of the game, you might find that most people writing about the issue have video cards "above" the recommended GTX 770.

So when I look at my situation with a GTX 580 and nothing out of the ordinary from day one, it seems that really the overclocked types (mostly they come factory overclocked already) are the culprits here, more often then not.

Guess there are limits concerning the adjustments possible for the GTX.
So instead - have you tried to adjust the video settings (in game)?

What I mean is a mix of high/medium/low for things like grass, terrain, NPC's visible.
Maybe disable ambient occlusion, bloom and light beams, vsync.

In my case disabling ambient occlusion had been one of the keys to let me run the game with the GTX 580.
It still goes up to almost 90°C, but the game runs just fine.

Good luck...

Since yesterday my PC freezes after the intro (menu comes up with Geralt chilling at the campsite)

I'll give that one more try before putting the game aside for quite a while.

Hi,

I've also had problems with freezes, game minimizing without reacting, and most of the time crashes straight to the desktop.

My system:

Intel i7 3930K @ 3,4 GHz
Asus P9X79 Pro
16 GB RAM (4x4, Quadchannel)
ATI Radeon HD 7970, 3GB VRAM

I tried almost every solution which someone claimed it worked for him, but none of them helped me.

I've never encountered problems when working or playing any other game, so till now I saw no need to update my BIOS; but since the last Update was 2 years ago, I decided to give it a try (and I was really desperate).
For me that did the trick. Since the update I've played about 12 hours without a single crash.

I doubt that this solution will work for everyone, as there seem to be many different causes for the crashes, but perhaps it will help a few people.

1.07 not soving anything in this matter.

I got the game working meanwhile, had to replace my PSU