The Witcher 3 Graphics Performance Review - Image Quality Settings and Test System

Image Quality Settings and Test System

Our measurements are taken in game. Our settings are as follows (BTW - Hairworks is DISABLED to objectively compare inbetween AMD and Nvidia cards):
 

Evereything is set to Ultra, AA is enabled, Nvidia Harworks is disabled and we use SSAO. The graphics cards used in this specific article are:

• GeForce GTX 760
• GeForce GTX 770
• GeForce GTX 780
• GeForce GTX 780 Ti
• GeForce GTX 960
• GeForce GTX 970
• GeForce GTX 980
• GeForce GTX Titan
• GeForce GTX Titan X
• Radeon HD 7970 GHz
• Radeon R9 270X
• Radeon R9 280X
• Radeon R9 285
• Radeon R9 290
• Radeon R9 290X (4GB)
• Radeon R9 290X (8GB)
• Radeon R9 295x2

So that is a selection of the more popular graphics cards anno 2015. Our test will be the a level recording based up-on a heavy on the GPU level. Therefore our FPS can overall look a little lower then what you guys see yourself. A test run can be quick or slow depending on your graphics card based on several factors like scene, resolution and image quality settings. Typically for a benchmark run there will be a scene rendered where the output of the number of frames rendered over time equals to an average framerate. 

Our test system is based on the eight-core Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition with Haswell-E based setup on the X99 chipset platform. This setup is overclocked to 4.40 GHz on all cores. Next to that we have energy saving functions disabled for this motherboard and processor (to ensure consistent benchmark results). We use Windows 8.1 all patched up. Each card runs on the same PC with the same operating system clone.

• GeForce cards use the latest 352.86 WHQL driver.
• AMD Radeon graphics cards we used the latest 15.4 Beta driver.