Witcher 2 finally running Like a dream

If you've just purchased your m14x and been hit by the FPS pig called witcher 2 and feeling a bit down.. please read on and I will save you 4 days of hell. Yes there are alot of threads like this around, but I wanted to contribute back after all the aggregated research and show what's worked for me.

Returning back to PC gaming after 9yrs of consoles has giving me a serious reality check. After 4 days of downloading drivers and an endless cycle of "tweak, test, tweak, test" I got so fed up I decided to put my m14x on ebay in state of rage. I then woke up the next day and played with the keyboard lights for a few hours to calm me down... ooooo pretty

I've read countless posts about who's to blame.. "its the DRM causing 10FPS loss", "its the nvidia 3d drivers, remove them", "its the dodgy configurator! use my custom user config and remember set the file to read only because witcher will mess with them". I've tweaked EVERY graphic setting individually and conclude that MOST of the settings (excluding UberSampling, SSAO, Anti-Aliasing) will not make a bloody bit of difference. You might end up with a 1/2 FPS gain after countless hours, don't bother..

What DOES make a significant difference is conservatively Overclocking your GPU (obviously at your own risk), something I honestly feared and wanted to avoid out of stubbornness as I just paid for the dam thing and shouldn't be doing it at this stage in its life. But then you have to bear in mind that Witcher 2 has alot to answer for, not the m14x.. everything else I've played has run like a dream after all.

Right, rant over, this is what has worked for me and I've gone from 20-25FPS on a good day to a consistent 35-60 FPS. Its worth noting everyone's eyes have varying sensitivity to FPS, 25FPS maybe ok for some, but for me its noticeable and puts me off playing.

1. Make sure you're running the nvidia 275.33 driver. Search these forums on how to apply it or you will just get an unsupported error when you try to install as dell have not approved it.

2. Ensure you're running latest version of witcher 2 (1.35). This takes DRM and 3d driver issues out of the equation so don't bother reading this stuff anymore.

3. I've had no problems with the configurator so don't bother with the custom user config files people are going on about. These settings work for me and its running like a dream (consistently 35FPS+). Could probably turn a couple more things on with room to spare.




4. Note I've reduced the resolution from my native 1600x900 to 1366x768. In addition, I've turned off vertical sync in the configurator as shown in the screenshot but I've actually enabled vertical sync and "triple buffering" for the witcher2.exe application via the nvidia control panel. I've heard it makes a difference but not validated this yet. I also set "power management mode" to "prefer maximium performance". again not sure if this made a difference but its that or the more ambiguous "adaptive" setting


5. Download MSI Afterburner and overclock (entirely at your own risk) to 700/1400/1080. I understand this is one of the most common and conservatives overclocks. Playing witcher 2 last night the temp stayed around 65c for most of the time. no artifacts, no dodgy graphical glitches etc.



6. Don't bother with CPU overclocking. extra heat to performance ratio is not worth it.

7. Its now an absolute pleasure to play in all situations and looks stunning.

8. Enjoy!!

Much luv

Jim

 

i will try that as i get a solid 30fps dips between fights
is that overclock ok? dont want too much strain on my m14x.

hope this works

 

Seems fine to me, but it was only running for a couple of hours. If I could consistently get 30-35FPS I would of been happy and left it be, Just not 20-25

 

but i have to get more fps to see if it can do it..

 

In my experience it's mostly a drivers issue. I installed W2 a week ago on a factory m14x and got 10fps or less in the dragon attack prologue scene. Borrowed a friend's GoG.com DRM-free copy patched to 1.2 with no change. Used a custom .ini file with no change. Fiddled around with graphics settings with no change.

Patched to 280.26 (make sure you uninstall rather than just patching over) and jumped to 35fps on mostly high settings.

Edit: I also dropped like 5C GPU temperature. Upgrade your drivers people.

 

When I just downloaded this driver it says my hardware isn't compatible. I am trying to run gta iv on my m14 atm. How do I go about getting older drivers? All I see on the nvidia website is the new driver I can't use. I won't download one from google I find because drive software has 100% access to your hardware, and is the easiest way to get a virus. Is there a trust worthy place you know of to download older drivers?

 

You need to copy over a modded .inf file after you finish extracting the driver files and then run the setup .exe manually. Do a search on this forum or on laptopvideo2go for the file.

 

Its nice to hear the 280 driver gives good returns and definitely preferable to my overclock! I had trouble installing this even with a custom file but I'll give this another go.

Thanks,

Jim

 

Hmmm.. got the 280.26 drive working but zero FPS improvement

 

Just bought witcher 2 from GOG. Both first and second game for $39.99 without ty DRM. Looking forward to giving it a go

On offer this weekend (Witcher 2 $29.99 and Witcher $9.99)