Official system requirements for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Not bad. Still kinda weird that these are lower than Dying Light's :) Wait, no they're not. I must've missed the update somehow.

Well, shit. If there's any game that will force me to buy a new GPU, it's gonna be this one. I mean, I meet the minimum requirements, but this is The Witcher we're talking about.

Seems about right, or at least all those seem like sane things. Minimum GPU is higher than I would have thought, but I guess that isn't surprising based on everything they have shown of the game. guess it finally is time for an upgrade.

My PC is way below minimum except OS, HDD and DX11. Oh, well, it's was bound to happen sooner rather than later. Still, four years on the same rig seems like a good run!

Also, here's a technical question: What does an i7 has, that an i5 hasn't? Bigger cache? Does it make that big of a difference?

My PC is not ready.

I was already planning on a processor upgrade, but that's the only aspect of my machine that doesn't meet these requirements. Kind of surprised by that.

Well seeing that my CPU is the minimum, I think it's about time to get that upgraded. Everything else I'm good to go.

CPU is the only thing that meets minimum, was planning on upgrading GPU and RAM before this came out anyway though.

well, i7 has hyperthreading, which by and large has had 0 impact in games for quite a while, BUT if devs start making use of more threads in their games an i7 could provide a significant performance boost in some areas I guess.

But I know next to nothing about this stuff, like what benefit does a bigger cache brings etc so...

Usually even when a game recommends an i7 you will be totally fine with an i5 though, if you have a good enough GPU you'll max everything out no problem.

Painful. The point where my CPU is no longer reaching the recommended specs is the point where I need to start considering upgrading.

I barely meet that.

well- it looks like a pc upgrade is in my future. but not until windows 10.

@mak_wikus: Recommended are still kinda higher than Witcher, it's asking for a 780

Cool, I guess I was expecting more but these are high enough anyways. I'm all set with my i7/980.

CPU's matter a bit more when open world games are concerned

Phew...I'm within the minimum requirements so I'm sure it'll probably look great. Not "face melting" but probably still great enough for me.

Also I believe hyperthreading is not limited to just i7s IIRC. Perhaps how lighting, shadows and other dynamic effects are handled by CPU calculations? (Not an expert!)

Yea, I did a partial upgrade in like June last year. I didnt upgrade my CPU. I didnt think it was going to be an issue. So I ended up getting a socket 1155 motherboard. Looks like that supports the recommend CPU, but ugh I kinda hate to buy that. I really dont understand CPUs these days.

I have a I5 2400 at 3.1GHz which barely runs AC Unity, tech its under minimum specs. CPU is pretty much maxed out when you pull up the task manager. Going from a 4 core 3.1 GHz to I7 at 3.4-5 just doesnt seem worth it. Specs, and cache are almost the same, mainly 6 vs 8 meg level 3 cache.

I just dont get why these offer so much more performance without additional cores. Would the CPUs be maxed on the I7s? Or near maxed? Ugh I see like one 6 core for 373$ why is this one so cheap? http://pcpartpicker.com/part/intel-cpu-bx80648i75820k I mean fuck seems like a waste to not at least go to 6 cores if I have to upgrade....FUCK! Didnt think I was going to have to do this so soon.

@john1912: hyperthreading

I have a vague concept of what that is, but you may as well have said fairy dust. They have had that BS in some form or another since the Pentium 4s.

I've got the same socket as you 1155 and the i5-3570k is still good. But yeah it's really annoying that Intel cpu's barely go down in price over time.

My system far exceeds the recommendations here but I'd like to see how the game performs on real world PCs. There have been other games recently with similar minimum and recommended CPUs that ended up not utilizing Hyperthreading at all, and with the 2500k and 3770k being essentially a sidegrade when it comes to most games, I'm a little skeptical.

I'm also a little curious about the 770 as a recommended card, that seems a little light. Maybe that is for 30 fps on high settings? I'm really curious to see what it's going to take to run The Witcher at 1080p/60 on Ultra.

I have everything but the 770 for the recommendation specs; I have a 760.

It basically simulates more cores without the need for physical ones, so my quad core i7 can simulate another 4 cores. I'm hoping Witcher 3 will be one of the first games to actually take advantage of what hypertreading can do

@gaspower: well at least for desktops hypertheading is just for i7s and i3s, in the case of the i3 its 2 physical cores plus hyperthreading so 4 logical threads.

CPUs are used mostly for gameplay purposes (character movement, camera, scripts etc ) plus physics when something like phyx isn't used, everything graphics related (lighting, effects, particles, shaders etc) is GPU side, one thing that really impacts performance is that the CPU serves as some sort of middleman between the GPU and the graphics API (directx mostly), so you could have the most advanced GPU on the planet, if you CPU sucks the performance will be garbage.

That's what mantle is trying to solve, make it so the API can talk directly to the GPU without needing the CPU to help(in a nutshell), it is also the promise of directx 12

These sound pretty reasonable for what it is, although at this point the game feels so far away I need to check myself from getting excited. Still doubt I'll be able to max this on my 780ti with good performance though.

I meet that but regardless you would think this game being delayed twice now would be optimized extremely well.......... I honestly believe this games gonna be a big let down. 5-6/10's incoming. My hype died for this game once they actually showed gameplay at E3.

@mb:

Well it's a small group but Bf4, Crysis 3 had hyperthreading. Metro Last Light & Redux should too but I don't know for sure. nope

I might upgrade next year if I wan't to go into Architecture proper or not... life

Hmm, raising an eyebrow at an i7 listed instead of an i5. I'd be curious to hear a technical explanation/justification from the team.

Other than that, my GPU is way out of date. I'll probably wait on this one. Didn't Witcher 2 get a massive performance update post launch?

@onarum: When I was reading your second paragraph where you mentioned the CPU as a middleman for DirectX, I remembered reading an article last year (I think it was on AnandTech?) that Mantle streamlines certain tasks to the GPU, and then you typed the same thing it in the next paragraph so it was kind of a weird, mental coincidence. :P Haha! Thanks for the clarification!

As expected, I'll need a GPU upgrade for recommended specs. CPU and all that is fine though.

lol wait so do you think they are lying? Like they are on the i7 payroll or they are just trying to make their game seem more demanding?

Just wondering what you think. Run across comments like this now and again and always just wonder what people think the "truth" is.

haha anyways yes the Witcher 2 did get a performance update but I don't remember it being very radical. And in fact if the Witcher 2 is to be used as a measuring stick than these "Recommended" specs will have this game running on Medium, at best.

@geraltitude said:

Haha, no no no! I just don't know what they're claiming the use is of having an i7 is from a tech standpoint. I mean, this isn't like 3D modeling software or something like that. If they are using multithreading in some creative way, I would love to hear about what it is. It's just unusual is all.

I'm not some conspiracy theorist. Although those explosions do look like planted charges...

Also damn, that lowers my hopes of being able to play it at current specs. Still might wait and see, but my GPU is going to need to get replaced regardless

@duncankeller: haha fair enough! I know what you mean. I'm gonna pick up Witcher for console first since I plan on upgrading the PC around time for xmas 2015, so depending on how the game really shakes out on actual PCs I will upgrade accordingly.

I mean if you're gonna upgrade anyways might as well go for it. Now does seem like a shakey time to upgrade our GPUs though. Feel like things will stabilize a lot over the next two years. If you don't have to have the game day 1 I'd wager there is ample info out there week 1 of release to make a more educated purchase.

Dunno if someone else debunked this already or what but maybe the i7 bonus is a cacheing one?

Time to overclock dat 8350 and maybe pick up a 2nd r9 290 and hope for 60fps

Thank god I'll be getting for this PS4. I had a somewhat beefy PC couple of years ago but my GPU is definitely lacking. With me trying to tighten my belt financially this year upgrading my PC isn't going to happen anytime soon.

darn, i was hoping that the specs would be lower... for the most part i meet the min specs, except my cpu is a old i7 920... so yeah... hopefully that won't matter, i really don't want to upgrade my cpu/motherboard/ram again... mainly since i don't want to have to deal with formatting my hard drives and dealing with windows 7 drm stuff.

The CPU requirements are the tough part.

Makes me wonder if the console one will be at the same level of fidelity. Id be surprised if CD Projeckt Red doesn't go the extra mile in optimizing the game for PC.

I'm pretty sure that my 4670K will be fine but it'll be interesting to see if the i7 requirements are genuine this time instead of being just slang for 'a beefy CPU'.

From what I heard Witcher 2 wasn't optimized particularly well. I played the game on 360 and it ran perfectly fine over there.

I'm fine with the specs except my vid card seems to be on the minimum side of things - I am more worried about optimization though. A lot of people here are planning to buy new stuff for this game but if they do a bad job of optimizing it then it's going to run like trash regardless. Considering all the delays, ehh, I'm a little cautious.

I do have the collectors pre-ordered on PC so I guess I gotta ride out the storm now, but I'm not planning on spending a consoles worth of money on a graphics card just for one game.

@humanity: Witcher 2 was very optimized, ubersampling was a really demanding setting made for future PCs and a lot of people turned that setting on and claimed that the game was unoptimized. They even added a warning to the setting in one of the first patches.

@ripelivejam said:

that depends on what you are comparing it to, a mid range pc with an i5 and a 760 yeah, maybe it'll have comparable fidelity to that, an i7 4790k with an gtx 980? not even close.

@humanity: Witcher 2 was a completely different beast on 360 compared to PC, and I played both. 30fps, smaller areas, much lower quality textures. I never found the PC version to be too bad, even when it launched I had a serviceable (but not exactly top end) gaming PC and I ran it on med/high no problems. Thesedays I can run it at 120fps on Ultra ... how technology marches on. ;-)

Yeah, that's my plan. I'd like to play it soon, but I don't need it day one. I'll just have to avoid spoilers :)

@gike987 said:

It's a bummer that the narrative around the Witcher 2 has somehow become that it came out un-optimized, because I feel like it really undersells how great CDPR are (historically, I'm not implying this'll be the case with the Witcher 3 b/c who knows) at squeezing power out of PC's. I had a decent-to-good laptop at the time and it ran beautifully with just a few settings bumped down at 1080 (I may have capped the framerate below 60, I don't remember, but I remember it running solid at whatever I capped it at).

Ubersampling really hurt that games rep, I guess.

Also yeah, those SR's are pretty steep, but then it seems like EVERY game releasing on PCs nowadays has had weirdly inflated Min. Req's that turn out to be far higher than actually NECESSARY, so who knows. Either way, probably safer to wait for a few days after release to see how it turns out.

I knew people were inflating the graphics when they thought a 780 wouldn't handle it at on high settings.

@jkz said:

You really consider those min reqs to be steep? I mean they're asking for a 4 year old i5 and a 3 year old mid range GPU, doesn't get more reasonable than that.

I upgraded last year to make sure I was ready when this came out... one of, if not, my most anticipated game of 2015. Seeing these specs means it's ever so close to release...

Everything I have is above par but my 660 is literally the minimum...

Might have to upgrade

Well i easily meet the recommended settings but knowing CDPR i will not be able to max out the game.