The Witcher 3 - Ryzen 3600 & GTX 1070 - FPS Test and Settings

Greetings, everybody.

Today we’re (re)testing The Witcher 3, this time on my R5 3600 and GTX 1070. My current PC specs are the following:

-CPU: Ryzen 5 3600 (stock settings) with Coolermaster Hyper 212 Black RGB.
-Mobo: MSI B450 Gaming Pro Carbon AC.
-GPU: Inno3D Twin X2 GTX 1070 (stock) and WHQL driver 441.87.
-RAM: Crucial Ballistix Sport LT (2x8GB) CL16 DDR4@3200 Mhz.
-Storage: PNY XLR8 CS3030 1TB NVMe (O.S.), Samsung 750 EVO 500 GB (game’s on this one)
-Case: Fractal Design Meshify S2.
-PSU: Corsair RMx 650W 80+ Gold.
-O.S: Windows 10 Pro 64bit.
-Monitor: AOC AGON AG251FG 1080p-240Hz.

So, Witcher 3, five years later, still one of my top 2-3 games to test stuff around, like new drivers, hardware, etc. I guess we all have one or two such games, Witcher 3 is that game for me. I also love replaying it, like it was just released, not many games that I know of feel like this for me, the old DOOM classic games, Quake, etc. were like this for me (also the new DOOM game, they’re just so fun to replay). So once more (and not for the last time) here we have some more Witcher 3 testing.

Since the game lacks a proper benchmark run, I do the usual stuff: testing presets from Low to Ultra; note that I do have the “HD Reworked Project” mod, it’s a small mod that only changes textures in a very subtle way, so they look on par with other better textures in the game, so nothing crazy here, I usually don’t mod my games that much. Still, mostly I tested with the mod disabled, anyway, just in case.

The game’s still mainly GPU bound at 1080p even at Low settings, and Hairworks is still the number one performance hitting setting, but with the Low HWs preset, it’s usable at 1080p on the GTX 1070 for 60’ish FPS gameplay, so I normally have that enabled.

To even come remotely close to being CPU limited, I needed to lower the resolution to 720p, and use Low settings, and then go into Novigrad, so the GPU usage dropped to 60-70%. That just means the R5 3600 is more than enough for this game even on more powerful GPUs, for sure, but still it’s possible to create a slight CPU bound situation, more like 40/60 % CPU/GPU bound kind of thing, but realistically speaking no one is going to play with these settings at this resolution, probably, it’s just fun stuff to test.

All in all, still a decently demanding game for my type of GPU. As usual, I hope this can be useful to any of you, and I’ll see you next time : )