So I got The Witcher some time ago, and have been very much enjoying the game. A couple weeks ago, I decided to try running it on max settings, since I've recently upgraded my box. It ran right as rain - for a while. Lately, whenever I've been doing anything taxing a la combat, the game stutters and jerks like crazy. I can still play, but it's maddening and it didn't use to happen. I've turned down all the graphics settings to the lowest possible, and have gone down from 1680x1050 to 1280x960, with no luck. I have also checked my anti-aliasing settings in CCC, which says that I am using multisampling (as opposed to supersampling, which apparently other people with my problem were). Does anyone else have any ideas?

Computer Specs:
Monitor: 1680x1050
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad, 2.40 GHz
RAM: 6 GB
Graphics Card: AMD Radeon HD 7800
Witcher Version: 1.4.5.1304

As far as I know, the latest version of the wichter is 2.0.0.12.
Make sure you have the latest patch installed and see if it makes a difference!

I don't suppose you know a reputable place to get it? I looked at the Witcher main site and the latest they have is 1.5.

Latest version is 1.5. I don't know what 2.0.0.12 is, unless it's some kind of numbering system GOG uses, and you wouldn't need any patches for the GOG version anyway. And the Witcher site is reputable. You may want to post your query there.

Yes 2.0.0.12 is the installer package number, 1.5.0.1304 is the game version.

How many saved games have you got?
Some have said that too many saved games have slowed everything down.

Yeah you may have too many saves... The Witcher does not override old quicksaves, it just makes new ones, so you can quickly accrue too many save files. Try deleting or moving some of them and see if it helps. If not, check some of the other solutions in the "Fixes To Common Problems" sticky thread.

Thanks for the help so far. I tried deleting all saves except my current one, and took a little look around the game to see if the problem cropped up elsewhere. I've found something funny - the frame rate drop seems to occur only during the death animation of a large enemy (Read: Ghoul, alghoul). After noticing initially that it happen during the death animation only, I went to go kill some drowners to test things out and it went fine. The common problems thread does not appear to have anything similar. And yes, I have the latest GoG launcher.

EDIT: Okay, now things are getting weird. It occurred to me that the problems I'm having might be due to the area I'm in, or even a specific enemy type, so I decided to go to a few more places (I'm near the end of Chapter II, doing some grinding before I move on) to see what might happen. I went to the swamp to test out enemies of various sizes, and it was all going swimmingly! I even put the game back on high settings, and performance didn't suffer one bit. Then, out of the blue, just as I killed an Echinops - the game crashed. It literally has never done this before.
Now that the common problems thread has something I can sort of sink my teeth into, I'm going to try out some of their advice and see if that helps.

EDIT 2: So I tried defragmenting the Witcher folder (as per the recommendation of the common problems thread for crashing) and that has also failed to solve the problem. Same thing with playing the game in windowed mode.

Well, people, I'm plum out of ideas. I can't deny that The Witcher was fun, but I can't keep playing it if it's just going to keep frame rate dropping/crashing like this. Thanks to the manual, I've managed to get a pretty good understanding of the story so I won't be lost when I move on to The Witcher 2, into which I will be importing a publicly available Neutral Path save. Thanks for all your help, everyone.

That's a shame... unfortunately I can't think of much else to try. I assume you've already tried uninstalling and reinstalling the game, and upgrading your graphics drivers? if you haven't, they're worth a shot, but don't hold your breath.