Since my new card will arrive while I’m still playing at a locked 30fps, I’m eager to keep going but locked at 60fps. Should be interesting. But no, kidding aside, it’s crazy to state 30 steady fps isn’t “smooth”. Christ, I remember a time when 30 was the GOAL. Not that 60 isn’t better, it’s very obviously better and anyone that has ever hit a steady 60fps that says otherwise is full of beans, but I stand by 30fps being a very enjoyable experience.
30fps is fine for most games, especially third person action. The Witcher 3 isn’t a pure fighting game, a multiplayer arena shooter, racing game, or anything requiring pinpoint accuracy.
Scott’s totally right though. 60fps obviously plays so much better than 30fps. The people that say they can’t see a difference must be blind. Once you go past 60fps, the visible gains are more debatable, but the variance below that mark is easily detected by the eye.
I can definitely tell the difference in smoothness between 30 and 60 in racing games, even though I might not be able to tell visually. The “feel” of the game definitely changes. Beyond racing games though, I’ve never paid attention to frame rates, so I’m not sure which console games fall into which category.
I believe it’s pretty rare for a console game to hit 60fps.
Any game in which I pan camera around me is just not smooth at 30fps on 60hz screen to my eyes. I can see the frame being skipped and the camera movement not being smooth. It is playable, it can be enjoyable, but only when I have 60fps synced with 60hz screen would I call the game being buttery smooth. It feels so much better. As much as I am stunned by how the game looks at 4K, I will gladly lower it to 1440p to get that smoothness, in every game.
Maybe Gsync would make sub60 better, since it would still be synced with the screen, but I have not seen Gsync in action yet.
If you are seeing the skipped frames, you should turn v-sync ON.
KevinC
6470
You still get “skipping” because the screen is only refreshing 30 times a second, not 60. Set your desktop to 30hz refresh. Make your browser a small window and drag it in circles around the screen, you’ll see the skip. Now do it with 60hz and 120/144hz. Huge difference, it looks more like the window is gliding across the monitor instead of skipping/juddering around. It’s even more noticeable to me in a game, where my eyes are trying to track movement and small details.
It’s amazing to think that they started with what was essentially a mod of the Aurora Engine from BioWare.
I think–and someone can correct me if I"m mistaken on the lore–that the space they had at their first E3 was basically borrowed/gifted to them from Bioware or Interplay out of a mix of pity or affection.
That’s what reddit said.
They were using their engine so it’s not like they were total strangers of course.
That’s not it, of course vsync is on. KevinC explains perfectly:
Just today I listened at work to two hours long interview with Marcin Iwinski, co-founder of CDP. He talked about this exactly. Basically CDP first wanted to port Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance to PC when seeing it at Interplay (whom they visited because they distributed BG for them in Poland earlier). Interplay said go for it, gave them PS2 devkit, but then went tits up and told them don’t bother, nobody is gonna pay you anyway. CDP already had the dev bug, so they decided to continue development but with something of their own, so they went and got the rights from Sapkowski to Witcher. Then they developed a prototype of it on Mortyr engine, but since the guy who did the engine didn’t want to share the knowhow, they decided to drop it and due to good relationship with Bioware, asked them if they would be willing to license Aurora. Bioware were thinking about licensing it anyway so they went for it. Then in 2004 CDP had second prototype running on Aurora, so Bioware let them showcase it in their E3 booth. Bioware were showing Jade Empire, huge Xbox exclusive, to the likes of IGN and Gamespot so of course these guys then looked at this strange european RPG, which was a great boon to CDP at the time.
In the end CDP rewrote 90% of the Aurora engine (and it shows) and had to drop the engine completely due to emerging multicore CPUs and upcoming console dev. But yeah Bioware were pretty helpful at CDP’s dev beginnings. Of course that happened because CDP published BG games in Poland and made them huge there thanks to their localization efforts and retail box bonuses.
Both of those prototypes can be seen in action here, courtesy of former CDP dev:
Based on the responses on the front page not everyone knows this, so I’ll repeat it here:
you can repair weapons and armor for free by using the grinding stones and armor benches found in several villages and cities…
Might help solve your money-problems a bit :-)
O_O
I didn’t know they also repaired stuff. And as I said above, I played 200 hours.
Well, I only found out recently because of a tooltip during loading (guess those long loads at Ps4 are good for something after all :-) ), so perhaps they’ve added this feature with the latest patches? No idea, but it’s definitely there now!
I said just about the same thing on the front page. Amazing that I missed that. I weep for all the money I spent repairing!
Quoting my own post here: I may in fact be totally wrong about this: Tom tried it in his game and couldn’t get it to work, and when I checked in my game it didn’t work either. I really don’t understand: I’m sure I didn’t just imagine reading the tip (which, of course, hasn’t shown itself in the last 5 reloads…), and I’m also sure I haven’t had to repair in ages. But maybe I just upgraded gear a lot? Or maybe it just works in the towns, not in the cities? Anyway, as far as I can tell now, I’m just plain wrong, and have been making a right fool out of myself.
I’ll keep on trying, and when I get the tip at the loading screen again I’ll take a picture of it and post it here, just to prove I’m not completely nuts… :-)
Sorry for getting anyone’s hopes up people!
Oh, whew! On the one hand that sucks for not having free repairs. On the other, it makes me not angry about missing out on free repairs and it validates CDPR’s game design.
If repairs were free at benches and grindstones, it would completely up-end the economy and encourage exploiting fast-travel for quick repairs.
Well, every time I’ve seen a bench or stone I’ve used it in my game. Free bonus to damage and armor! So I actually repaired my stuff with them lots of times. In fact I always had a pair of dozens unspent armor/weapons repair tools, and repairs weren’t that expensive.
To be honest, I never had money problems in the Witcher 3 until the expansions came, in fact it was the other way around, I had a bit too much money.
If repairs were free at benches and grindstones, it would completely up-end the economy and encourage exploiting fast-travel for quick repairs.
To be fair, the game encourages exploiting fast travel in plenty of ways (eg short timers on free buffs).
