Most noticeable in cut scenes for me. Just background objects, trees, clothing, hair, textures, everything. Pops in and out, mostly just super delayed. Is this universal or something I'm running improperly in my settings? I've got fancy hair turned off and most other settings on high-ultra. Draw distance is on high cause ultra causes a chug. Even though the foliage pop in when I run around is super noticeable and lame :/

Have you got the sharpen filter set to high? If so that causes more pop-in, especially with meshes/textures that have transparency (hair, foliage.)

You can actually fix this pop-in, though you will take a performance hit. If you use the Witcher 3 Hunter's Config tool you can tweak many of the games graphical options including the LOD, foliage density, foliage distance scaling etc (it's in the rendering section of Hunter's Config). I increased the values for the distance scaling of grass and foliage and it basically fixed the pop-in issue (NPC pop still occurs but I believe that is a separate issue) but I lost quite a few frames in certain situations. So it's clear that the pop in is being done for performance reasons.

Ah word thanks ya'll. I think sharpening is at high for me.

I got occasional NPC pop ins thats weird to say the least. If i ride into a village as an exmple maybe 5-10sec later some random peasents will pop in from nowhere even though i run the game at a stable 60FPS from an SSD.

No popin going on with the graphics though.

Yeah, I get it pretty bad although I haven't really been paying attention since i stopped using in game sharpening and use sweetfx presets with a custom luma sharpen

Its gotten worse post patch it seems. Really distracting. I will walk down novigrad and suddenly 3 guards will pop up 5 feet infront of me.

Funnily enough i get it more with Geralt's beard. Nevertheless i think it also happened with some npcs but i didnt really pay attention.

Haven't had any pop-in whatsoever.

No sharpening, depth of field, or post-processing enabled. textures medium, rest a mix of medium/high, with foliage-related settings at maximum, because foliage=sexy.

Maybe lower texture settings...the pop-in could be related to a lack of GPU vRAM...and don't worry. Witcher 3 medium texture detail is still better then Witcher 2 @ Ultra

@mcfart: Haha funnily enough the dudes on the pcmasterrace subreddit were complaining about the texture foliave being worse than in TW2.

Hardly noticed any at all. I do have it installed on an SSD which may be helping.

I do sometimes get the weird phasing out thing when something gets too close to the camera.

No pop in here. (GTX 980 4GB so that is a likely reason why). Pop-in is usually a symptom of some component not running fast enough for the game, so rendering certain objects/textures gets delayed. Not that brute-forcing the issue with hardware is the best fix, often games can be made to process textures more efficiently, or the priority on items is changed to reduce the visibility of pop-in.

As above, the Hunter's Config tool can fix this - it lets you make things render further away - pop in still happens, its just far enough away you dont see it. Of course, more area kept rendered = more RAM usage.

Didn't seem like it.

This is what I normally get though I do have the odd Geralt's Beard not loading for less than .2 seconds or some close up object showing the pixely haze of being distant, annoying but not that pervasive.

Running at a high FPS on an SSD.

Well foilage is not the same as texture detail but still that stretching it. Witcher 2 is a damn good looking game though, much better looking for its time than Witcher 3 is with todays standards. The main problem with Witcher 2 is the extreme sharpening filter thats applied to everything, thankfully you can turn that off in Witcher 3.

I've had some pop in, mostly running through Novigrad with NPC's just showing up as I run past. Occasionally Geralt's beard loads in the middle of cutscenes. Other than that nothing major or annoying.

It might just be now that I'm in Novigrad, or maybe its like some of the updates or something, but I basically never had pop in at all and now I'm seeing it occasionally. For some reason a lot of people's necklaces. Also on fish nets in markets. Doesn't really bother me much but it does seem to be cropping up more.

@rethla: Also that framerate munching ubersampling.

I have only noticed bad pop-in one time. I had Roach trotting down a road and we came across what looked like an abandoned wagon on the side of the road. Suddenly six or eight NPCs popped into existence and started talking. It was pretty strange, although I consider that more of a bug than pop-in since it only happened once. This was on patch 1.05.

The PC it happened on was a 4790k, two GTX 780 Tis, 16 GB DDR3, and a fast SSD. Although, I also play the game on a PC with a 4690k, a single 780, 16 GB DDR3, and the same SSD and while my frame rate is quite a bit lower on that system, it doesn't have any problems with pop-in either.

Nope. C drive is a SSD on SATA 3 and my gaming storage drive is 10K RPM with a 64 GB cache on SATA 3. Other than the Barons daughter I havent had any popin issues at all.

So you guys don't even get bad character pop in in novigrad??? I put mine on an SSD and it didn't help much, i still haven't been in that area much since i stopped using the sharpening though so maybe i'll test that later.

Every now and then during a cutscene. It will switch to a character, then go back to say The Witcher and his hair will be in the process of finishing loading.

I don't recall pop-in. You know what's worse? The disgusting lens/screen effects that can't be turned off.

Gallery

Yeah I get a lot of pop in on stuff in cut scenes when the camera changed angle. Stuff like Geralts beard popping in. One time there was a guard with a helmet and the camera cut to a far away shot and he didnt have the helmet on, then it cut back and the helmet dithered into existence. I am on an SSD too.

@oursin_360: Nope. No Novigrad pop in. I didn't even know this was an issue for anyone. I play the game on Ultra in 1080p and like I said earlier the only time I noticed any pop in was with the Bloody Barons daughter a few patches ago. She would momentarily show up bald and then have her hair come in about a second later sometimes. A few seconds out of about 100 hrs so far is perfectly acceptable IMO so far. Building a computer consists of more than just the processor and video card. There are memory, storage, and data transfer rate concerns you should think of as well.

@bluefalcon: Well this clearly is not a hardware problem but rather a sideffect of the game being optimised for slow consoles. If you got pop in and the game use only 20% of the RAM and Video memory you cant blame the computer.

@rethla: how s this "clearly" not a hardware problem? I do t exactly have a supercomputer but I don't experience this pop in effect on my machine. Am I somehow running a different Witcher 3 v1.05 than you?

@bluefalcon: Well tell me what memory, storage and transfer rates you are using that makes the Witcher 3 v1.05 run as intended. From what i have gathered there is popins on all kinds of systems and settings.

It takes me 1sec to fast travel across the map with no popins but it occasionally takes 10sec to load in a peasent when im walking around, you call that a hardware problem?

@rethla: I thought I explained myself in the last post but I'll try again in even plainer language. This is not a universal problem. It isn't universal because a large number of PC gamers to include myself don't experience this issue at all. Assuming we are running the same 1.05 version of the game and assuming you don't have anything funky going on with your OS, drivers, or background software that leaves differences in hardware. You could have a slow disk, slow bus, a video card with speed/memory issues, etc. Any number of things that are normally clear to experienced system builders.

I wonder if enlarging the minimum size of some buffer in the .ini files wouldn't be enough to solve the problem for anybody who experiences it. For me it used to happen semi-frequently before one of the patches (I think v1.03). Since then it only happened occasionally, like once every 10 conversations and it was never as severe as missing hair - just more detail appearing after a split second. And mind you, I only had 1GB of VRAM. It must be some swapping mechanism which allows inferior harware like mine cope with the detail of the models. Don't blame consoles, these are separate versions of the game after all. Blame guys like me who delay changin the GPU ad infinitum (actually until last Saturday, the GTX960 comes in the mail tomorrow).

I don't think it's a hardware issue. I've been playing the game both on my main system (GTX 980 SLI) and my secondary system (780 Ti) and I've noticed relatively poor rendering distance on not just foliage but also some textures, shadows etc in the game without any ini tweaks. Of note, the in-game settings seem to have no effect on the speedtree rendering which is the primary reason for the "pop-in" of foliage and grass; though I would term it more like "fade-in" in my case as the foliage and grass noticeably fade into view on the screen when my character is moving forward. The only way to improve this rendering distance is to modify the ini file. Again increasing the rendering distance will end up decreasing the performance (by a lot in some situations if you really maximize the rendering distance) so I can understand why the devs chose not to increase this value with the in-game sliders but I would gladly lose a few frames if that means it will mostly get rid of the annoying fade-in.

I don't know, i've moved it to an SSD, i have 3gb of memory on the video card and 8gb on actual memory, 8core 8350 @4.4ghz. Characters will randomly pop in while walking around and in some cutscenes hair, clothes, armor will pop in. It started in patch 1.04 and i haven't really seen much cutscene pop in with 1.05 but I still see people pop out of nowhere sometimes and reading online i'm not the only one.

@bluefalcon: well we both know what version of witcher 3 we are running. I was asking what system you have thats popin free.

Im running gtx980 and the game on a fresh ssd. Even on low settings i get popin now and then even though the fps is locked at 60 (max for my tv screen) and the game loads in 1sec. Its very minimal and it doesnt bother me at all but for the sake of this thread i bring it up. If you are an experienced systembuilder please tell me whats wrong.

@rethla: Beats me. You named one and a partial description of a piece of your computer. Not a mind reader buddy.

The pop in happens no matter what hardware you use, let it be SLI Quad Titan X with 5960X and 32GB ram or a low spec PC. Just go to the Novigrad and enter via the main gate and you'll see those horrible NPC pop ins. If anyone says there's no NPC pop ins on their rig is just straight up lying to themselves and us.

This thread dates back to the previous patch which had huge pop-in problems.

@basketsnake: Well its more or less the same in 1.07

Too bad. I had it but the patched fixed it.