I just updated to the new 1.03 version. The performance is much worse. I was able to maintain 60 FPS almost all the time using two 670 SLI with hair works off. Now, with the same settings I constantly dip down into the low 40's. I am going to reinstall the game and keep with 1.02 because the performance is terrible now.

Update: Several others reporting a drop in 5-10 FPS as well.

Well it worked perfectly for me so the patch is not bad...

oh look another of those 'it works for me so it's perfect and your fault'

As opposed to "it didn't work for me, so it must be a bad patch". *sigh*

I didn't say that at all, i just said the patch was not bad because it appears to work here. Which implies that it is not necessarily the patch that is the problem. The fun of PC gaming, could be anything!

Mine is also much more stable, no crashes since patch If you read the patch notes they upped the AA threshold on 'ultra' for sharpening and HBAO i think, possible those new settings pushed your FPS down.

Well, first impression was perhaps slightly better performance. But I really did not have any performance issues at all.
Now trying it again, I'm actually getting worse performance, and this is while settings are set lower.

Also settings are now not saving. Everytime I start the game up, the settings have moved back again. And nothing is set to read only or anything like that.

Sharpness seems to work differently now, it seems way to sharp for trees and nature if set to high. And setting it to low, makes faces and characters look not good. At least for me.

I might reinstall the entire thing again.

Solved my problem with settings not saving, by deleting the entire witcher 3 userconfig folder. This ensured a fresh recreation of the files.

Not everyone has your same computer and others are reporting lower FPS. The only thing that wasn't needed was your comment.

I did a little testing and the open areas between towns seem to be great. However, some small town areas are having huge performance drops and others not. In 1.02 I drop down to maybe 55 FPS in these towns. In 1.03 I drop down to 42 FPS and spike around.

Wasn't the purpose of the patch to up the graphics fidelity on PCs? Doesn't it stand to reason that that would result in a frame rate drop? Just saying.

just out of curiosity, do you run nvidia experience? that still causes resetting of settings on some peeps machines

Glad I'm not alone here. Had everything maxed out on GTX980 and running smooth. New update has seen HUGE drop in FPS for me in places, and thats even after turning down some of the settings I originally had on Ultra... One point the framerate dropped so much I couldn't exit the game as it was taking so long!

I have already made sure it does not interfere with any game. But I identified the problem for me.
I had added "MovieUbersampling=false" in 1.02 as a part in trying to get the ingame cinematic to run better. It did not work, but it also did nothing else either. In 1.03, this would wreck the entire saving settings thing.

Dudes... For some people it may work for others it may not. I'm still downloading the patch but I had constant 30 fps with almost all maxed out, it played flawlessly.
I certainly hope I'm not one of those who gets screwed by this update, I'll edit this post in a few minutes.

Edit: So far so good, I've noticed a slight drop on the fps, but barely noticeable. I'm speaking about noticing how the camera movement stops being fluid at some points, when before this update it was fluid all the time.