The Witcher 3 Unplayable R9 280 3GB OC

[michaelpls]

Hi There,

I am having trouble getting The Witcher 3 to be playable on my PC.
I have updated to the latest AMD Catalyst Beta Drivers, set everything to the lowest possible setting and installed the latest Witcher 3 update. But I still get massive amounts of stuttering. For example, I will have a solid 90FPS and all of a sudden it will drop to 0-10FPS for about 2 seconds then it will go back up to 90FPS.
I can play AC Black Flag and Unity fine... as well as Project Cars on Medium settings.
If anyone know's what's happening I would really appreciate your help. I really want to play this game.

Kind Regards,
Michael

CPU Pentium G3258 @ 4333 MHz
RAM 4GB 2X G Skill RipjawsX F3-12800CL9-2GBXL
GPU AMD Radeon R9 280 (Tahiti) (Sapphire OC 3GB edition)

 

[James Mason]

it's your CPU and lack of ram.

 

[michaelpls]

it's your CPU and lack of ram.

I've seen people play this game on a Surface Pro 2 without stuttering, albeit with very low settings. Surely I could get a steady FPS with similar settings? I realise I need more ram and am planning to get a 4690K as soon as I can, I was just hoping to play through the story.

Anyway, more ram and a better CPU it is. Not wasting time with "budget" gaming builds in future.
Cheers.

 

[iam2thecrowe]

i have to agree its the cpu and ram. Dual core cpu's when loaded up will certainly get stuttering when some background task tries to use some of the cpu power. Same with ram, you run out, the game pauses to load, fps drops to near nothing, data loaded to memory, game continues at full pace. You can try something like razor's gamebooster. It disables unneccesary background tasks to free up some ram and processing time for your game. Despite some saying it doesnt work, it does work in the right scanario's like low ram and low cpu cores/threads like you have.
http://www.razersupport.com/software/gamebooster/

 

[gamerk316]

Eh, Witcher 3 is surprisingly light on the CPU front; even Haswell i3's perform the same as i7's in most benchmarks. Granted, a Pentium is a Pentium, and the lack of HTT might be making all the difference here. RAM is also going to be a problem, since Paging could also be causing those stutters.

Easiest thing to do is open Task Manager and check what CPU load looks like. You can also launch the Performance Monitor and make sure RAM isn't filling up or HDD activity isn't spiking (Paging).

 

[Neur0nauT]

Its a bottleneck between the GPU & CPU, the 4GB is trying to make up in between for the bottleneck and maxing out the RAM. You could improve things by investing in an 8GB kit to begin with, but you also need to upgrade your CPU to a Quad core or better.

 

[James Mason]

it's your CPU and lack of ram.

I've seen people play this game on a Surface Pro 2 without stuttering, albeit with very low settings. Surely I could get a steady FPS with similar settings? I realise I need more ram and am planning to get a 4690K as soon as I can, I was just hoping to play through the story.

Anyway, more ram and a better CPU it is. Not wasting time with "budget" gaming builds in future.
Cheers.

Surface Pro 2s have 4-core i5s and up to 8 gbs of ram, so that's probably why it can play the witcher 3.

The stuttering thing is also a "known issue" with the g3258, and considering that even heavily OC'd it'd only as good as stock i3, it's not exactly worth it in the long run.