I have a I7 4790k with a msi gtx 980 gaming edition and it still struggles sometimes to play this game on ultra even at 1440x900.Mostly with slow down and screen tearing . I fixed most of it by setting addaptive vsync in geforce control panal and turning it off in game with frames set to unlimited. Had to turn off hairworks too. Sense you have a similar setup I figured id ask where was your lowest performance areas .Mine was near wher the devil by the well quest is and another near the house beside the giant windmill outside white orchard. If I stand and face the the windmill with everything set to ultra the screen tears horrribly when I turn, setting hairworks to off stops it but some area it still happened. have you had any experiances like that. A 980 is suppsed to run this game good but mine has some issues.

Very interesting. I might try this. Running i7-4790k with a GTX 970, but I've only had 4 crashes over 40+ hours and steady framerates throughout. Not sure the 970 could handle it, but it'd be worth a shot :)

Wanted to throw out that I got a fair amount of dithering in shadows until I tweaked the shadows in user.settings. After that I almost never notice it. It is also possible that forcing the game to use higher quality mips had an effect on this, so that's worth looking at as well!

I never use adaptive Vsync, horrible horrible solution that would stop me playing a game altogether!!!. Keep Vsync forced on in the control panel, set framerate to unlimited in game and lock your framerate to 40 FPS (bear with me) using RTSS (available as a free bundle with MSI afterburner).

I assume you are never dropping below 40 FPS with your setup? I am usually very sensitive to frame variance and in the past had a hard time playing below 45 FPS or so. However, with the Witcher 3 I have locked to 30 FPS since that gives me the most stable framerate (with very occasional dips to 27 FPS). Mostly high settings with hairworks off. In this game 30 FPS actually feels tolerably smooth, and since your setup is way faster than mine you should be able to handle 45 at all times easily (without hairworks). I enabled motion blur (something else I never do in other games) which helps make camera movement smooth. Also, I did notice that hairworks performance is better with patch 1.05. YMMV.
Lastly, with Vsync forced, sometimes a problem occurs that when your framerate drops below 60 FPS the framerate will drop off to 30 FPS (on a 60 Hz monitor). If this happens, either enable triple buffering in Nvidia CP, or CTRL-ALT-DEL out of the game and go back in to refresh the framebuffer (I find the latter always solves the issue in games that do this). Seems to be an Nvidia problem, always does this to me in Assassins Creed IV and GTAV, but not in Witcher 3.

MSI GTX 760 OC
I5 4670
Running the game off a Transcend SSD, does not really help load times but does help with disc streaming in-game

Strange because I have an i5 3570K (running at 4gig), GTX 770 and Asus P8Z77-V and it runs on Ultra setting lovely and smooth (1080p). I see some graphic problem ocassionally but they are just bugs within the game (awkward walking animations from villagers and guards, characters suddenly appearing out of know where and sloooow to react controls) but for me the game runs gorgeous.

I think people tend to assume the CPU and graphics card is all they need for a great gaming experience. The motherboard has a huge effect on how a game performs, No point having a £300 or £400 graphics card if your mobo is the 'break' in the chain. Not saying this is your issue, but Asus for me at least has always made great gaming boards.

Sorry for the late reply, work tends to get in the way sometimes ;) I've never tried riva tuner before it pains to have ti play at 45 frames instead of 60 . When i set it to 30 frames in game it ran juttery and not all toghether smooth . I heard if you ran vsync at half refresh rate in nividia control panel it will clear this but havent tried it. One odd thing, when turned display mode to borderless window in the ingame settings all the screen tearing stopped. When I set it to fullscreen the tearing started again. This is with hairworks on. The framerate seemed alot more stable as well. Seems strange as I thought games ran better in fullscreen any ideas? I could always play it in borderless i guess.

Edit: Seems you already answered my guestion. Forcing vsync on in control panel stopped all the screen tearing. I wonder why the ingame vsync diddnt work on fulscreen niether did adaptive. Still has some slowdown in some areas especially with a up close shot of that silver mullet but looks and plays a hell of a lot better thanks.

Glad that the control panel cleared up your screen tearing, to me a game is completely unplayable with any tearing at all!
Keep it forced in the control panel, and disable V-Sync in all your games (the control panel overrides the game settings).
Honestly, I don't find hairworks very worthwhile and certainly not worth any slowdown. The built in solution is adequate, and honestly when playing the game I never even really notice the hair. Hairworks has a loooong way to go for performance and realism. Opinions may differ, but I actually found the hair better implemented in Alice Madness Returns and Tomb Raider, than it was here with Hairworks (physics, bounciness, strand detail etc)

As per above, I highly suggest MSI afterburner with RTSS. Its free, has many useful features (hardware monitoring, tweaking etc) and I find RTSS frame locking is the best solution out there (as do many others), which reduces frame latency. Believe me, it also pains me to reduce my frame rate to below 60, but in this case it is necessary!

Happy playing!

I have downloaded all the updates, and now I am having graphics problems, before I downloaded the updates there were no graphics problems. I am getting things like see through houses and ships show up like a huge mess, how can I help this. Will need to get a refund on this game if this is not fixed