Did anyone notice the severe slowdown (framerate drop) when entering the Crypt in
Vizima Outskirts? So far everything ran smooth, but the second I enter the Crypt the
game framerate drops to a crawl.

After a while the framerate rises again, however, when fighting ghouls ...especially
when killing them the framerate drops again?

My computer is AMD x3 720 with 4 GB ram and ATI 6850. Using Windows 7 64bit.

I've experienced something similar.

To be clear: Are you talking about the Crypt in chapter I? (i.e. not the one within the city sewers) I never personally discovered any problem there.

However, not too long ago I noticed ... uhm ... okay, be forewarned, there might be some spoilers in what I am about to write (I hardly think so, but fair warning and all that): I was about to finish up with Chapter III (you get the message from Triss that you should finish up before speaking with her again as you might never have a chance to come back) and then realised I had somehow forgotten to clean out the Lionhead Spider Cultists' lair, something I normally always do at some point in Chapter II, and since there's a Diamond to be had there, I wanted to grab it before moving on.

Anyway, I pop down into the sewers from the Temple Quarter (the entrance where you first come out with Siegfried at the start of Chapter II) and I click the nearest bars (my mistake, that's the wrong crypt -- this one has 4 graveirs and sometimes a bunch of ghouls). Anyway, the Witcher promptly CRASHED. I fired the game back up and went to try again -- same thing, crash to desktop.

So I restarted my game (for other reasons) and went to the graveir crypt at the very start of Chapter III: no problems at all. And right now, I'd say I'm about 75% done with Chapter III, and I popped back into the same graveir crypt: Extreme slowdowns, although only in battle, and interestingly, for everything I kill (all 4 graveirs and the ghouls) nothing leaves a corpse (whereas they did so previously).

I've no conclusion, but my working theory is that something about that crypt gets worse the further into Chapter III you are. I should mention that I've done rather a bit of extreme levelling at the cockatrice crypt in the swamp (yeah, go ahead and call me a very sad grinder) so my Geralt is currently at level 42. I'm not sure whether it's the character level or the progression through Chapter III, but something very definitely is strange about that crypt.

I'm going to finish up Chapter III like before and come back to the graveir crypt; my theory is that while I'm just seeing big slowdowns now, by the time I've done everything else this location will again be un-enterable (i.e. it will crash me to desktop).

So there you go, a rather long winded answer, but with all the detail I was able to cram in there. Hope it helps someone. Most of all, I'd love for CD Projekt RED to fix it, although I guess shipping a patch for Witcher now that Witcher 2 has just hit the shelves isn't exactly likely.

I have not experienced this... did you have any trouble in other indoor areas? Like in the Prologue, when you enter the Witcher laboratory, which is a similarly-designed area?

There could be a graphics option that's causing this. Try messing with shadow settings in particular and see if it clears up.

I realize the original post is 12 years old, but my experience could help others.

I am playing the Enhanced Edition and I had the exact same problem as 5pellfire. The framerate, which otherwise was fine, dropped to about 5 fps upon entering the crypt, was fine again after a few seconds and dropped to a crawl during the death animations of ghouls, whose bodies disappeared through the floor once dead. I tried changing the game settings, changing video drivers. No improvement.

I was playing the game with the iGPU of my Core-i5 12400 and 16 GB of RAM. I then got a used GTX 1060 6GB, which is about 4 times faster than my iGPU, loaded the game and... nothing changed. I loaded the game from a save, just before entering the crypt, and the same framerate issues reappeared once inside.

I read somewhere that a bad save could be the problem, so I decided to start a new game. When I got to the Vizima Outskirts crypt, all was well. There was a bit of a slowdown on death animations, but nothing major.

So, those slowdowns don't appear to be hardware related. Something about the way the game saves data as one progresses? I don't know. The second time I played the first chapter, I got to the crypt much more quickly. Saved less often.