I just started it to change graphical options and change key bindnings (argh, still annoyed that some are locked) and I had no issues so far with a GTX 470 (minimum GTX 660).

My CPU and RAM is at recommended settings I think.

Good to know, thanks.

I have a gtx 460m and I'm worried it might not even boot up!

I'll confirm this later. To put to rest questions about rigs barely meeting the minimum requirements.

Mine are.

Core i3 3220 @ 3.3 GHZ (Dual-Core, Four Threads)
8 GB RAM
GTX 560 Ti
1366*768 Native Resolution

Yeah I am really wondering how the game would run on my pc. Some kind of benchmark would be appreciated but I don't think we'll get one.

My Specs:

i7 2600 @3.40
8GB RAM
nvidia GTX 580

Somebody with comparable specs that has the game?

I don't believe it does that because I have a CPU and RAM compliant with recommended specs, but I have a Radeon HD7850 which is below the minimum specs. The game starts up and runs fine, autoconfigures the graphics settings based on its perception of the capabilities of your hardware and you can run it and decide if it is playable or not for yourself.

In my case after reading the official minimum and recommended hardware specs and looking at the amazing graphics trailers and screenshots and whatnot I fully expected that I'd have to lower the resolution to the lowest available (which is 1024x768) and set all graphics eye candy settings to LOW, however to my surprise the game runs at 2560x1600 native resolution of my 30" display and configured some of the settings to LOW and some to MEDIUM and I get between 20-40 FPS in game depending on what's on screen so far. The weird thing is though that 20FPS in Witcher 3 feels like 40FPS did in Skyrim, I can't explain why but my brain feels it out like that.

If I were to drop my resolution down to 1920x1200 it would be about 1/2 the pixels and would probably double my frame rate also, so while my GPU is under the minimum requirements it turns out that the requirements listed are probably all for the game running on MEDIUM (minimum specs) and ULTRA (recommended specs) or something like that because it is totally playable.

If someone has a much older card however it might not be capable of even running the game perhaps and the game might possibly detect that and prevent it in theory but I have no way to test that so it's just a theory. My out of spec GPU works fine here though, and way way better than I could have dreamed based on the trailers and commentary leading up to the game's release.

wonderful post, thank you. You give me hope. Just a few more hours and I'll be able to drop in how my system runs. Fingers crossed!!

I hope you're able to get as great an experience as I did. I was literally so blown away I couldn't even play the game because I couldn't think straight. I had to take a couple breaks to go get food to clear my head from overwhelming emotional response. I've never in my life had a game do that to me. LOL Now I can play it with a normal level of high enthusiasm without blowing my wad in my pants though, but I do recommend keeping a spare pair of underwear around just to be safe hehe.

Seems that anything that isn't a 9xx series card runs like crap with ANY setting above medium, even minor stuff. A Titan from that generation looses to a 960, which should just not happen. AMD users are experiencing similar issues.

Coupled with the fact that the game uses proprietary nvidia libraries (nvidia gameworks) makes me suspicious that they are intentionaly gimping performance of older cards to try and force people in to buying a new one :/

I run the game on system that has both CPU and GPU below minimum. It's playable at 1360x768 at 35-45 FPS. My CPU is quad-core Phenom II 9950 (just a few percent below the minimum though) and GPU is GeForce 750 GTX (around 30% below).
EDIT:
8GB RAM, Win 8.1

IMHO, that would make no sense business-wise as it would result in less game sales. It amounts to "hey, lets make our game so that people can't play it unless they go spend $400 more that we don't actually benefit from and by doing so it makes them less likely to actually buy our game." more or less. :)

The game runs on my Radeon 7850 quite well considering it is below minimum spec even though it uses LOW+MEDIUM settings. Still looks incredible. They did an amazing job optimizing this game to get that level of graphics out of this hardware IMHO. Hopefully they will continue to optimize the game also and possibly update it in the future to support one or more of Mantle/Vulkan/DX12 for further optimization though too. It'd be great to run it on ULTRA but for my eyes that'd just be extra cherries on top of the already delicious cake so to speak. :)

Its official. I can run this game flawlessly. Steam seems to have no problems at all too.

I can confirm the following specs can run this game albeit the game have chosen the best settings.

Core i3 3220 @ 3.3 GHZ (Dual-Core, Four Threads)
8 GB RAM
GTX 560 Ti @ high load
1366*768 Native Resolution

Game runs beautifully even with hairworks enabled.

Edit. I had to disable this option to gain more frames though. =P

Not the best experience for me unfortunately. I've gotten up to 26fps max in places, but still heavily tweaking config files to try and improves. Shadows are a major killer, but it's tricky to reduce them or turn them off.

The frame rate I'm getting is a lot lower than I would have expected that I'd consider playable, and definitely lower than the frame rate I've found unplayable in other games - but it is not having the same effect on this game to my eyes. I'm really curious why that might be that I don't notice it as much. I wonder if motion-blur enabled has anything to do with that, tricking the eyes or something. I dunno.

resolution is king if you haven't tried that yet. I reduced all the minimum LOD settings further by a factor of 10, but dropping resolution made all the difference.

Unfortunately resolutions less than 768 rows will only render as a window.

Regarding OP, I'm playing on integrated graphics, so obviously this game doesn't give 2 shirts about meeting the minimum requirements.