Hi,

im a complete noob in the world of pc but have used bootcamp on my imac i7 gtx 870m with no issues.

The game starts the intro plays all good then the game starts and everything lags and moves in slow motion, so strange the textures are all there it looks amazing just moves slow.

Also the sound track is all running fine. however when i plug in a xbox 360 controller the sound goes off.

i have updated everything the cpu the gpu and all the windows updates, it got slighty better but still really slow.

Have i missed something???

intel i5 6600 3.30
8gb ddr4 2400mhz
geforce gtx 970 4gb gddr5
mother board da-z170xp
power ocz 650w 80 plus
1tb harddrive

waited over a year to get into pc gaming, i know if got to work hard to learn and get better with it all so anyhelp is welcome.

Would be helpful to know a bit about your grafix settings (options, in game)...

sure i am using the nvida experience and i used optimal settings. then i switched down to low to see if that fixed it. it was still the same slow.
the set up is a hdmi to my sony tv at the recommended settings for that.

You say you're a complete noob so I'm going to go with some really simple things. Not trying to insult you, just checking the basics, you know? Your hardware is absolutely good enough to get a smooth gameplay experience from the game, though perhaps not at maximum graphics settings.

There are two major things to think about, with graphics settings; details and resolution. When you switch things to low, are you only lowering the details (things like draw distance and antialiasing) or are you also lowering your resolution? As an example, a typical HD resolution of 1920x1080 has almost three times the pixels of a 1024x768 resolution, meaning it takes almost three times as much graphical power to draw the picture.

Is there any chance that you're running a really aggressive antivirus program that does real-time checks on all your files? If you're willing to play offline, there's no great need to keep a real-time antivirus running while you're not connected to the internet. Similarly, are you running a bunch of other programs in the background that could be using a lot of system resources?

You aren't using a virtual machine to run Windows, are you? I see that your system specs aren't teh same as the imac you mention, but just want to check - VMs are....very bad for gaming. If you don't even know what they are, then you aren't running one, so don't worry.

LIFO:

8GB of RAM is plenty for the game. However, the way nVidia cards usually work (and the 970 is no exception) is that they will use up to twice their on-board RAM as a kind of swap space, so it's possible you could see a small improvement if you added a little more RAM. But that's a small thing.

50% resource from your browser? Yeah, that would do it. That will help a lot, to make sure you close out any extra programs before you start the game.

Your resolution is probably the biggest slowdown for you. If you are able to enjoy the game at a lower resolution, you should try to drop the settings and see if that makes things better. Once the 10xx series graphics cards have been out for a little while, so that 3rd party resellers like EVGA can offer them and drive down the prices, you may want to look into changing out your graphics card. The GTX 970 was a pretty bad choice on nVidia's part (they made some curious choices about how they made their card use the VRAM it had) and unfortunately, Witcher 3 uses enough memory for its textures that the flaws in the otherwise good 970 can show. I don't know if that's a huge deal, but if it were my system, I'd add some RAM and change the video card as the first upgrades, when I had money laying around.

So I changed the resolution and it helped a bit but it looked so bad, I got so much better performance from my bootcamp mac I was using a thunderbolt to hdmi would that make any difference ? so strange that the mac could smash it, maybe because it was an i7 16gb ram ?

I have ordered a htc vive will that be ok as its just going to use the headset ? I might have to invest a little bit more it seems. will adding the 1080 mean I need to change the i5 6600? I have 14 days on this machine so might just return it and start again.

thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me about the issue, I am tearing my hair out.

Thunderbolt to HDMI shouldn't make a difference. Thunderbolt and HDMI both transfer information at the same speed (technically HDMI is two percent faster, but that's effectively just a rounding error), and there shouldn't be any sort of "translation" problems between the two, unlike if you were running something analog to digital, or vice versa. I really don't know anything about the Vive. I mean, I googled it so I know what it is, but I have no idea how it works in real life, no idea what problems it creates. Sorry.

If you upgrade your graphics card, you will *not* need to upgrade your CPU. They work together but independently, so you can swap them out one at a time. Your CPU is actually really, really good for gaming, and should not be the reason Witcher 3 is acting strangely.

You said in a previous post that Witcher 3 is not the only game acting like this. That makes me think it is a problem with your hardware. You might not need to splurge on the GTX1080 (though by all means, do so if you wish, I've spent an embarrassing amount of money of gaming computers in my life, so won't judge ^_^ ) - the GTX 1070 should be a good hundred pounds cheaper and will give you amazing performance. If you *were* going to get a 1080, you would be best advised to wait until the 1080Ti comes out and decide if you want to upgrade to that, or take the price savings on the base 1080, which will get cheaper when it's no longer the fastest card they offer. Anyway, with it not being just Witcher acting that way, you might see if the problem persists when you play games on your monitor (you said you were running it to your television, right?). If the problem is between the PC and TV, then you don't need to do anything to the computer. If it's the same thing on both your monitor and your TV, then maybe you think about returning the computer while you can and getting something with a touch more RAM and a different graphics card, yeah.

Oh, just one last thing - you're pretty much absolutely sure that you're plugging into your discrete graphics card (the 970) and not the integrated graphics, right? It didn't occur to me to ask before. If you have accidentally connected to your integrated graphics, then it all makes perfect sense, and is an easy fix - just move the cables to the correct connection point. You're welcome ^_^

your specs are really good and far better for gaming than the imac's, where the game was running well as you said. did you run any other modern/demanding dx11 game or a gpu benchmark ?

youre not running the game from the cpu integrated gpu? (DP/HDMI/DVI on the mobo i/o) skipping the gtx by chance?

if not your drivers or even bios settings are screwed up - your specs are sufficent to drive the game with fuild 30fps on ultra

I had this same issue; the game offers you a framerate option; I had to mess with it in order to address that..

In graphics settings it asks: "What framerate would you prefer: unlimited, 30 or 60"
Try all three settings (60 might cause slomo); I never encountered any issues with this in older patches; however in the new patch it somehow caused me slow downs and delayed input.

Can't guarantee that this will fix it, but it's worth a try :)