I did fall over the same thing, that i wasnt able to alter tesselation settings. Nvidia claims in their witcher 3 guide, that Maxwell is 3 times faster at doing tesselation than kepler... so if all benchmarks are done at ultra (Thus 64x tesselation), that might contribute (if not all together explain) to why kepler is struggeling.

But Kepler itself is several times faster at tessellation than the 290x. Which was the whole argument behind the Crysis tesselation-gate thing. So if tessellation is really a factor here, why is the 290x also not struggling? Did AMD unlock tessellation performance in a recent driver? Is it more optimized towards their method of tessellation? I'm not being facetious, I'm just trying to understand why there is such a performance difference with Kepler here.

something is very wrong with the 7 series. the 780ti should be on par with the 290x

The 290x normally beats both the 780TI and GTX970. What Nvidia is doing with their Gameworks is not ethical, and it's not helping the video game industry move forward. Why not make the source code available like AMD does and enable all developers to implement these visual and physics effects in their games. That way, the source code can be updated and optimized more frequently and all games regardless of how big the studio is will be able to implement these effects without having to worry about the code not running properly on one vendor's GPUs and what not. This is such a mess! I watched a video of the PC version maxed out on YT and I have to say...the game doesn't look anything special at all. I don't think it looks much different from the Witcher 2.

Yeah, im just trying to understand it aswell - the tessellation thing was the only thing i could really think of causing it, aside of carelessness (or possibly malicious intent) from nvidia. The fact that amd is that much slower at tesselation than kepler makes it even wierder actually.

Tessellation is improved alot on AMD. They are in pair since HD 5000/6000 series. I dont think thats the issue here.

Perhaps more importantly, the GTX 980 is also on average 8% faster than the GTX 780 Ti and 13.5% faster than AMD's Radeon R9 290X (in Uber mode, as that's what most shipping cards use). Compute performance sees some even larger gains over previous NVIDIA GPUs, with the 980 besting the 680 by 132%; it's also 16% faster than the 780 Ti but "only" 1.5% faster than the 290X – though the 290X still beats the GTX 980 in Sony Vegas Pro 12 and SystemCompute.

From WCCFTech: However a quick look at the R9 285’s tessellation performance reveals that the situation isn’t exactly as Burke made out it to be. Based on tessellation performance alone, an R9 285 should see a comparable performance hit to the GTX 960 when enabling HairWorks. However that’s not the case, not even remotely. The R9 285 actually sees a performance penalty that’s twice as bad as that seen on the GTX 960. And because CD Projekt Red and AMD are not allowed to work towards identifying and addressing the real culprit behind this poor performance in the game code we’re back to square one.

From WCCFTech: However a quick look at the R9 285’s tessellation performance reveals that the situation isn’t exactly as Burke made out it to be. Based on tessellation performance alone, an R9 285 should see a comparable performance hit to the GTX 960 when enabling HairWorks. However that’s not the case, not even remotely. The R9 285 actually sees a performance penalty that’s twice as bad as that seen on the GTX 960. And because CD Projekt Red and AMD are not allowed to work towards identifying and addressing the real culprit behind this poor performance in the game code we’re back to square one.

Nope Kepler has still faster tessellation. Although I agree it improved a lot since GCN series 7000 and now 290.. http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph8526/67750.png http://www.anandtech.com/show/8526/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-review/19 http://www.computerbase.de/2013-10/amd-radeon-r9-290x-test/13/#diagramm-stone-giant-2560-1600 Compute ain't either 980 vs 780ti, especially once you start to OC Kepler quick percentage by gaming and compute http://www.anandtech.com/show/8549/short-bytes-nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-in-1000-words To me it looks like they made the game in favor of Maxwell and crippled on the rest, its bundled with 960+ afterall lol, fail marketing.

Absolute joke. Those R295x2 results are disgraceful 😛uke2:

Now lets see how things go with other upcoming titles. Question probably still remains in many peoples minds, Nvidia 'neglecting' kepler or has that arch seen its limits with newer games? The problem is that this is occurring on a gameworks title. If "neglect" (which I doubt), I will probably not buy an Nvidia card again.

Now lets see how things go with other upcoming titles. Question probably still remains in many peoples minds, Nvidia 'neglecting' kepler or has that arch seen its limits with newer games? The problem is that this is occurring on a gameworks title. If "neglect" (which I doubt), I will probably not buy an Nvidia card again.