Like others, my game is crashing on this quest. In my case, just after Ciri enteres the portal.

Reading through this forum and others, this seems to be a common problem, varied only by the point in the quest where the crash occurs.

Any solutions yet?

Addition.

I was contatced by someone who put me onto this page: https://levelskip.com/rpgs/How-to-fix-crashes-in-The-Witcher-3-and-improve-performance

I did each of the steps for NVIDIA and finished the game without further problems. (Note. I haven't tried the AMD stuff, but if it works as well as the NVIDIA then it is fine.)

I've posted the tips below incase that page disappears.

If I may take this opportunity to suggest, don't turn off when you see the credits, as I was about to.

Press SPACE and get to, what is essentially, a new Witcher game.

Also, this will allow you to start again.

For NVIDIA

1. Right-click on your desktop and enter NVIDIA Control Panel.

2. Go to "Manage 3D Settings" and then to "Program Settings."

3. In the "Select a program to customize" box, select The Witcher 3 (witcher3.exe).

4. Go to Vertical Sync and select Adaptive (You need to have the in-game V-Sync turned off)

While you are still in the NVIDIA Control Panel, we can do some tweaks in order to gain some extra FPS.

1. In the Configure Surround/PhysX section of the NVIDIA Control Panel, change the Processor (in the PhysX settings) from GPU to CPU.

2. Go to Manage 3D Settings and then go to Program Settings. Here we are gonna select witcher3.exe in the Select a program to customize section.

3. After the executable for The Witcher 3 is selected, we will apply this setting.

The Anisotropic Filtering will be set to 16x. There are no visible frame drops when using this setting and it will make the game textures look better.
The Maximum Pre-Rendered Frames will be set to 1. This setting will make the game more smooth.
The Multi-Display/Mixed-GPU Acceleration will be set to Single display performance mode (if you have only one display).
The Power management mode will be set to Prefer maximum performance.
The Threaded optimization, Triple buffering and Trilinear optimization will be turned on
*PS: Some settings can be found and applied for AMD users via AMD Catalyst or Radeon PRO.

For AMD

1. Open Radeon Pro and then add a profile for Witcher3.exe by pressing on the "+" icon marked in the photo.

2. Go to the Tweaks tab on the right and then select the Dynamic option on the VSync Control.

3. You can also enable Triple-Buffering.

Config Files Tweaks

We can tweak some values in the configuration files for more stability and performance improvements.

Resources.ini

1. Go to The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt\bin\config\base and find resources.ini.

2. Make a backup in case you want to revert the changes made.

3. Find the line "MaxRequests: in the [ResourceLoading/Decompression] category and change it from 32 to 40. If the game is still unstable, you can try a value that will fit for your hardware (try to keep it between 32 and 40).

Rendering.ini

1. Go to The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt\bin\config\base and find rendering.ini.

2. Make a back-up for this file too.

3. Find this line: TextureMipBias. Change the value to 0.

4. Find this line: TextureMemoryBudget. Change the value from 500 to 1024.

Delete Some .dlls for Extra Performance and Stability

Yes, I know it is scary to delete dlls, but the game will not act weird if we delete some of them and we can gain some fps and stability.

1. Detele Galaxy.dll from the "The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt\bin\x64" folder. The are reports that this .dll causes some crashes. Note that after deleting it, the game will show an error, but you can press "OK" and the game will start and perform just fine.

2. Detele APEX_ClothingGPU_x64.dll from the same folder. By deleting this .dll you can gain some fps (not a lot). No errors will be shown after deleting it and the game will be a little bit smoother.