After the 1.03 patch, I am unable to play at the ultra settings I had been playing at prior with great success. Post-patch, my machine will seize up if I choose Ultra. So, bumping them down to High with a few tweaks (Hairworks on all, etc) seems to work.

Anyone else having troubles?

What specific setting in Video or Post Processing was directly affected by the patch? AA apparently was bumped to 16x, is that right? I'd really like to tweak my machine back up to ultra with the exception of those items specifically attributed to the patch. High is great and all, but it definitely does not look like ultra.

UPDATE: Thought I had it beat by deciding to reset/revert everything to whatever the game wanted. Then I used GeForce to Optimize the settings. Yesterday, I had a crash-free set of gaming sessions. It was great! Today, however, nothing but crashes and machine seize ups. I went into GeForce after the latest crash to find my settings weren't optimized again; the textures setting was listed as ---. Maybe it was corrupted? Changed it back to ultra (or rather, let GeForce Optimize again). Played a few minutes, seemed Ok, seized up my machine again.

Now I'm verifying files through Steam. Ugh. Love the game, but I've given up one games that just continue to crash; I hate that feeling of playing and not knowing I'm going to be able to play again without managing twenty things to start the bugger back up (and not knowing even then if its stable).

It all looks so bad compared to how it could be. Fucking console optimization rekt the game's capacity to be the most beautiful RPG ever. My rig runs it with everything on Ultra and it still doesn't look as good as The Witcher 2 maxed out with ubersampling. The foliage is 2D... We of the PC gaming ilk spend a great deal of time and money to play our games with the best possible settings. Hopefully they fix this with an Enhanced Edition.

Hairworks is tough on a mid range PC, if you want more frames and higher graphical settings outside of post processing I recommend turning it off.

been thinking that , have played some right b4 3 and made some screenshots, its mindboggling that w2 is 4 years old . been curious about the hughe patch next week , where tehy will improve graphics etc, hopes are still up , and if not that im praying to the gods that the modders go nuts like in skyrim :D

The graphics are fine for me. It's just the color palette. I really hope to get that mature fantasy back, TW2 offered.

UPDATE 2: five play sessions without crashing. However, I have a different problem to report: W3 seizes my machine if I power it for the first time. Circle loading icon after bard's brief intro is where it seizes up; hard reboot is the only fix. I see my drive light on full, and even walked away once for 5 minutes. Frozen and harddrive working overtime. After rebooting, however, W3 works instantly and no problems until I turn off the PC at night - haven't tried it from a sleep startup, however.

UPDATE: Played a second time through without it crashing or otherwise giving me any troubles at all. Hopefully it continues!

Original post: Well, opted to reset all the graphics and though I generally avoid GeForce like the plague and its "optimization", I let it optimize my settings. It seems to have worked for now back at ultra everything, though I only just completed a two hour non-collapsing/non-machine seizing play session. It's when I try to load the game back up! Haha! Then we'll see if it will let me continue to play.

At this point I have not felt it is as mature a game as 2 was. Had the kid that I gave the potion of Swallow to died a writhing and agonizing death because of my naive desire to save her then I would have felt assured that CDPR did it again. While mourning the loss of life and hating myself for trying to save her, of course. Lots of time left in my playthrough, it is certainly hard if you play on Death March your first time in. Harder than playing Witcher 2 on Dark Mode? No, not in the beginning at least. The Witcher 2 on Insanity is so hard it is comparable to Contra. That is, if you don't use cheap tactics like only bomb throwing to win. Dark Mode for 3 will give 5 lives instead of The Witcher 2's single, solitary life. That is a little dissapointing to me because I can already feel Death March getting easy.