If you're like me and finding that the scenery in the game is heavily pixellated and sometimes gets dotted with a fresh covering of white "lice," you might want to try this if you're running an NVidia card. The dithering started to get so prominent on my "ultra" settings with my I7 and GTX980 that it began to ruin the cutscenes as well.

Go into your NVidia control panel settings and turn on DSR, and then bump up the game's resolution in the settings and let the NVidia card downsample for you. Along the way, it will also apply antialiasing, which as far as I can tell, is not working properly within the game (Just an option to turn it on or off? No 2x, 4x, 8x options? REALLY??). Alternately, you might try overriding the antialiasing settings by forcing the Nvidia control panel settings, but I've found this tended to cause the game to crash more often on mine (or perhaps that's the 1.50 patch?).

I'd only recommend this for high-end users who've experienced no problems maintaining a high frame rate, as the added overhead will cut into that. I've personally found good results by bumping up the resolution to 2560x1440, and breathtaking visuals at 3840x2160 (though you'd probably need a hefty system to keep the framerates from dropping during cutscenes for that one). For me at least, running without DSR at lower resolutions (even 1920x1080) suffers in comparison.

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.

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