I'm also getting this problem since visiting Floatsam, I got the first crash right after the section with the magical shield. I've been playing on but crashses occur anywhere after 30 mins of play, never had a crash after just loading a game, could be a memory leak that grows worse until crash.

My guess is also that this must also have something to do with memory lack....

For those stuck at the cut scene:

Try disabeling all of the DOF effects (as was mentioned somewhere above). That did not rid me of all of my crashes, but it definitely solved the dialogue and cut scene crashes.

BUT what is particularly funny is that I turned all of those features off for lone time, tried it out, crashed, told myself "well, alright switch it back on, seems to make no difference" and tadaaaaaaaaa, I have been playing crash free ever since :D...no kidding, it is really working for me now. Try it out, maybe you're lucky too or the game had a problem with some triggered story events that I "crashplayed" past and now I am free again.

GOOD LUCK TOO YOU ALL!

I have no clue as to how I lack memory. I have 8 gigs of ddr3 as well as a gig on my 460 GTX SE Fermi. I will attempt the disabling of all the DOF effects and see how that goes.

I really love this game but have to admit defeat, the crashing problem has become too common for me, it's making enjoyable play impossible, I think I will shelve the game until a few patches are released.

Well, you can have memory problems no matter how much RAM you have: The whole thing strongly reminded me of the good old days of tweaking Oblivion to the max, with extra trees, ini-modified draw distance. In the early days there was no mod to clean up your RAM when playing like this so the data just piled up and piled up until your memory was fed up and you crashed in a similar way. This happened with the original release of Oblivion as well, just not so often or fast. But a mod was released that regularly got all the trash out of your RAM and this also increased performance drastically.

I disabled the DOF effects and it worked. I'm in Flotsam, but it's still EXTREMELY buggy. I'm also having constant crashing problems, still. Turning off the DOF does seem to help a bit, though.

When i hit the loading screen, right after Geralt has escaped the castle in the prologue, my game chrashes instantly.... it sucks

I can only recommend to advance the Flotsam story a bit. Nearly all of my crashes stopped after that and although the game was crashing very often at the beginning of the Flotsam questline, I am playing crash- and bugfree now and have been for hours and hours.

To everyone with CTD after getting to Floatsam:

Seems this is a game optimization issue on cd projekt's side, they prob didn't cap the memory allocation or smthin.

Try this:

You want to enable the 3GB switch on the Windows Vista™ or Windows 7 operating systems.

To enable the 3GB switch on Windows Vista™ or Windows 7:

Right-click Command Prompt in the Accessories program group of the Start menu. Click Run as Administrator.
At the command prompt, enter "bcdedit /set IncreaseUserVa 3072"
Restart the computer.
To disable the 3GB switch:

Right-click on Command Prompt in the Accessories program group of the Start menu. Click Run as Administrator.
At the command prompt, enter "bcdedit /deletevalue IncreaseUserVa"
Restart the computer.

taken from:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=123112&id=9583842&linkID=9240697

source:
http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/975399-the-witcher-2-assassins-of-kings/59162920

That sounds quite intensive, I thinik I'll wait for patch.

you just start command prompt with admin rights and type 1 command.. lol

on my 64bit windows 7 pc i dont get any crashing at all. (4gb ddr2) playing for hours all through flotsam.

as soon as i installed the game today on my 32bit windows 7 (4gb ddr3) pc, i instantly started crashing all over the place in flotsam as soon as i got off the boat. i can now load from a save just outside the tavern, and guarantee a crash when i enter a building, exit and look in my inventory.
when i say crash, i use it in the loosest sense, the game just instantly exits to desktop. theres no messages or anything to indicate a crash/unresponsive program.

have now implemented the bcdedit (thought i had previously) and will report back later if its cured the problem.


edit - yes, BCDEDIT did cure the problem of crashing in Flotsam. obviously the witcher 2 is going beyond the 2gb boundary at points and just exiting out.

full settings and system specs incase a dev looks in.

win 7 32bit ultimate service pack 1 - fully updated
core2quad q6600
4gb ddr3
radeon 4890 - 11.5 drivers
connection via hdmi - stereo sound - using amd hdmi drivers

1920x1080 - fullscreen
texture downscaling - none
texture memory size - very large
shadows - high
shadowed lights - high
all 3 DOF - on
vignette - on
motion blur - off
bloom - on
light rays - on
ssao - on
antialiasing - off
ubersampling - off
decal number - high
decal limiter - disabled

before bcdedit = crash
after bcdedit = no crash

Don't forget to disable DoF settings (all 3 of them)

Those 2 settings fixed my crashing problems, just played 2,5h straight with no crash.

I have actually found that once I get outside of Flotsam...I don't crash...AT ALL.

But the instant I decide to step inside of Flotsam. It crashes.

Which leads me to think that all the hypothesis on there being a lack of a cap for memory usage is true.

I can confirm that this works for me.