I'm experiencing some weird issues in the first Witcher game. FPS dips when there are special effects like spells on the screen and the game always stutters with Vsync on or off in large open areas. Now I'm at Chapter 3 in the trading quarter of Vizima and I have strangely low fps in the city (around 40 at some points) and since the fight with the creature Javed summons at the end of Chapter 2 I have a graphical glitch on the screen: small red dot-like things (looks like blood splatter) appear when I move the camera and move around any area in the game.

Here are my specs:
Windows 7 ultimate 64 bit
i7 2600 3.4 ghz CPU
Geforce GTX 560 GPU
8 gigs of RAM
7200 rpm HDD

I'm absolutely sure that with a machine like this I shouln't get FPS drops in a game that was released in 2007. What can be the cause of these things? Bad compatibility with Win 7? Driver issues (I'm using the latest drivers btw.)?

On the red dot thing: I got fooled by the game there, as it turns out this is an effect caused by a high toxicity level.

As for the performance issues I tried to run the game with the oldest GPU drivers available for my card (june 2011) but it had no positive effect.

Many players experience slowdowns in the Trade Quarter during Chapter 3. There are a LOT of people in the Trade Quarter, and animating all those people is a stretch for some systems.

Although the game was made in 2007, it pushed the old Aurora Engine to its limits, and the game requires surprisingly high specs to run at high resolutions in the Trade Quarter. Lowering the graphics quality while you're in Chapter 3 usually speeds things up again.


And as you discovered, those red dots are not a bug or a graphical artifact; they're supposed to be there when Geralt's toxicity goes over 50%.

The final Visima chapter is also pretty choppy, but I think that's a CPU issue due to the large number of individual characters running AI at any time.

However, when did 40fps become low? In most games (with the possible exception of online shooters), anything above 20 is perfectly playable.

Well I was very surprised to learn that the game uses Aurora. :D At some points Witcher is still quite the looker even these days so it's very impressive what CDP managed to get out of it.

This explains why the game uses the resources of a more modern computer very poorly but it's still sad to see the stuttering and the 20-25 fps when there are a lot of lighting effects on the screen (for example the fight against the Beast was a horrible nightmare instead of good gameplay because of this).

I enjoy the game very much but using the engine of Neverwinter Nights was not a good idea at all. The second game is not Aurora so I can only hope I will not experience these issues there on my system though graphics quality seems insane so I'm not even sure if I could run W2 properly. :D

I always look for a smooth 60 fps in a game or at least 30 if the game is designed in a way that it feels fine on a lower framerate. Withcer is perfectly playable on 40 fps but if you get a solid, vsync-ed 60 fps 90% of the time slowdowns and stutters start to annoy you.

The Witcher 1 doesn't look photorealistic the way The Witcher 2 does, but I think it's at least as beautiful. Quite the looker, as you say. Watch the sun rise over the Fields in Chapter 4 or over the Lakeside (also in Chapter 4) ... lots of us nearly got killed because we were busy admiring the scenery. :P Well, The Witcher was the first game CD Projekt RED ever made, so I can see why they'd want to use an existing engine for the game, and in 2003, when they started, there weren't many other RPG engines to choose from. They seem VERY happy with the Red Engine now, though. :D

Anyone found a solution to that fps-issue in the trade quarter? I am playing with a Geforce 285 GTX and e Core2Duo E8500 on Win XP and I get between 25-30 fps. That´s quite annoying.

Some people find that they get better framerates if they go to the Options menu and turn down the graphics quality while they're in Chapter 3. You can usually turn it back up once you enter the cave that starts the end of Chapter 3.

I think we can agree on that this is not a real solution, only a functional workaround. GPU and CPU utilization is extremely low on these parts which proves that the game can't use the advantages of a high spec PC. The solution would be a patch optimizing the engine or maybe a new GPU driver that solves these issues but chances are we're never going to see that happen. :)

I always had the same issue with Age of Empires 3: in large battles fps can dip to 15-20 fps and GPU / CPU utilization hits the ground because the old engine can't really handle new computers.