Jespersgaard: Where in the game does it stutter? There is (and will always be) stuttering in Novigrad when there are loads of people around. I get that even with a GTX980TI and 4X4.0 GHz i7. If you have hairworks turned on I advice you to turn it off - it causes notable performance drops - especially when using a Radeon card (Hairworks is NVidia technology).

The expensive (but effective) solution would be buying a monitor with AMD freesync. Playing with an NVidia card I am using a G-sync monitor and that really decreases the amount of stuttering you experience. At very low FPS levels this will not help either though.

Jespersgaard: Do you have the latest Catalyst driver installed?

Santiago: What you can also do is go into your Radeon settings and gaming/global settings and switch power efficiency to off. They added this feature to prevent exactly what you are describing. Not saying this is it for sure, but it's possible, definitely something you should test.

Jespersgaard: Okay. First: If you are using any mods I suggest you delete them all as they can often cause such problems (especially if they are not made for version 1.24 of the game). If you are using GOG Galaxy then use the Verify/Repair function to make sure that no files are corrupt and/or missing.

Under settings I think only two things matter with a Radeon card. As I mentioned earlier make sure to disable hairworks. Also under Ambient Occlusion I suggest you use SSAO instead of HBAO+ (HBAO+ is also an Nvidia feature). Stay far away from Vsync. Vsync forces your framerate to stay at a certain level (typically 60 FPS because this matches a 60 Hz monitor), but it can actually cause stuttering (and other issues if your specs cannot always maintain a steady 60 FPS). You should only use Vsync if your game is running at more than 60 FPS on a 60 Hz screen, because this causes "tearing" (your monitor not being able to keep up with the framerate). I would still not use Vsync even in this situation simply because it makes games feel "clunky" in my opinion.

If none of this helps make sure your computer (and in particular your graphics card) is properly cooled. Your card can handle some very high temperatures but still: Make sure nothing is off the charts. Your system may be doing fine in other games but Witcher 3 is so incredibly demanding it can reveal such deficiencies.

I'm afraid this is all the advice I can give. I sure hope some of it helps :-)

armitom: There is no power efficiency option on my CCC, i may be wrong but it was only an option for the R9-4xxx series.

Santiago: No the power efficiency thing started with R9 380 and above, but the R9 290 is a pretty good card (faster than my 380) so it would have been possible this would have been available there too, sorry...

What I could recommend still is to do a

dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth

and then

sfc /scannow

to ensure there are no serious problems with your Windows installation. Just type it into the power shell with admin privileges.

Also, are you using a virus scanner or something? Is your Windows Defender enabled/disabled? It's possible a virus scanner with its real time scanner could interfere. Use https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 if you don't know how to disable Windows Defender.