[Foxford1]

Hi, im having a serious case of low fps (8-15) with the wicher 2, i played through half of the game not really noticing it until i reached act 2 when it became unplayable. I looked through all the forums, at least the ones that appear on first 2 pages of google, and tried many different ideas/fixes and nothing helped can anyone help me pls
my cpu

64 operatin system on windows 7
video card geforce gt 540
processor Intel Core i7 2630 qm 2.00 ghz
ram 12 gig

Also, here are some info i found out or fixes i tried;
I tried low frame rate fix made by a fan of a game
changed settings in tweaker and normal option, including resolution
tried changing some settings in nvidia control panel
installed patches, then downgraded when other problem occured

and yes i have installed the newest drivers for my card

Any help would be greatly appreciated

[*Tommy*]

The only problem I see is with your video card . With that card I would try a resolution of 1280 x 720 and low specs to see if your FPS increases .

[Foxford1]

Thanks for help but it changed almost nothing, instead at8-15 range it is 13-15. The odd thing is that all new games or at least relatively new game si played on that card on at least medium settings or high. I know that this game has decent graphics but not so much that my pc should struggle even with the lowest settings.

[Guy N'wah]

Is that a notebook? (The processor is a notebook model.) If so, that GPU is more likely a 540M, which is the equivalent of a desktop GT 430 or GT 530.

This game chews up and spits out GPUs. All the artwork that went into this game comes at a price, and that price is billions of output processor cycles. The fact that it runs other games well is unfortunately not much help, because of all the games on the market, very few are anywhere near as demanding as this one.

Since it's actually well below minimum for the game, with about one-third the capability needed for good performance, *Tommy* is right: see what it will do at 1280x720 and either low or medium settings, and you're probably not going to get much beyond that.

[Foxford1]

Ok, i see, this is actually very depressing caus as much as i didnt mind it at the beginning (at some point i was actually even running it high with little trouble) i managed to get through half of the and now im stuck. is there nothing else i can do? as i said above i tried it with same results, so i might as well play high as it makes no difference then /> I just dont understand how can the witcher 2 can be the only game im having problems with
it is a shot in the dark but can changing version/patches help?

[Guy N'wah]

I've found version 2.0 is less hard on the GPU than the Enhanced Edition (EE), but you give up some good content by going backward, and it may not be possible to go back if what you bought was the EE.

This game was written on a unique engine, and it was written for the upper range of somewhat older PCs. The graphics engine requires a lot of processing at the output stage, unlike many other games that exercise the unified shaders and texture mappers. Older high-end cards have strong output stages with at least 16 processors, but recent low and mid-range nVidia cards have skinny output stages, usually with only 4 processors.

[thelostdunmer]

Your gpu is the culprit here bud. If its on a notebook then you can do nothing.

[Foxford1]

Thanks a lot for help, sadly from what im reading people with much worse specs than mine have it good, supporting what you said ( i wish you were wrong ). im gonna look around some more and if anyone has any suggestions pls tell me

[Guy N'wah]

Foxford1 said:

Thanks a lot for help, sadly from what im reading people with much worse specs than mine have it good, supporting what you said ( i wish you were wrong ). im gonna look around some more and if anyone has any suggestions pls tell me ›››

The catch is, beyond a certain fairly low requirement, the CPU and RAM don't matter much. The game wants only 2GB RAM for itself, and a Core 2 Quad, Phenom II x3, or Core i3 is an adequate CPU.

It's the GPU, and claiming that a GPU is powerful when it is not is one of the biggest lies salesmen tell. What you have is a recent low-end nVidia GPU, not the high-end GPU this game demands.

I'm reasonably sure nobody else is getting satisfactory performance out of a 540M, and if somebody is claiming better, then what he has is most likely not worse.

[Umair2012]

Foxford1 said:

Thanks a lot for help, sadly from what im reading people with much worse specs than mine have it good, supporting what you said ( i wish you were wrong /> ). im gonna look around some more and if anyone has any suggestions pls tell me ›››

Turn off uber sampling . Use enhanced edition . Turn off cinematic depth of field and set texture memory size to high .

[bulll]

set texture downscaling to high , texture memory size very high ( try all these options if u get lag or crashes ) , ubersampling off , and just turn off everything else ...

n trun down ur resolution ... the game will not look great but atleast ull have decent frames ... i had a 9800gt which i dont know is better or worse than ur card and i used to get like 30-40 fps .. hope this helps

[Guy N'wah]

bulll said:

set texture downscaling to high , texture memory size very high ( try all these options if u get lag or crashes ) , ubersampling off , and just turn off everything else ...

n trun down ur resolution ... the game will not look great but atleast ull have decent frames ... i had a 9800gt which i dont know is better or worse than ur card and i used to get like 30-40 fps .. hope this helps ›››

9800 GT's a much better card than the OP has. This game doesn't make use of any more than Windows XP and DirectX 9 provide. That's one of those powerful older cards that are far more capable than the low end of the new nVidia stuff.

Texture downscaling's a mixed bag. It saves memory, but it's more work for the GPU to do. Often low-end GPUs with a lot of memory (the 540M has 1GB dedicated memory) will do better with texture downscaling set to None and memory budget set to Very Large. Try setting texture downscaling and memory budget at either end of the scale and see which works better for you.

[bigbadmclovin]

your video card is not that great, but I dont think thats the problem...

you have an i7 and those have a graphic cheapset incorporate to "help" your video card... well, TW2 doesnt know that! and it take the chipset as the main video card (at least thats what happens to me)

I was having 12fps with an i7 2700K at 4.2 Ghz, 8 gigas of RAM and a GTX670.

you should go to the BIOS and diactivate the 2nd video card (the chipset of course) and that way the game will pull the 540 as the main card.

now decide, the 540 is medium-low, so choose between low resolution and high details or high resolution but low details...

hope it helps!

best.

[Foxford1]

yet another edit:
bigbadmclovin, i really think you are onto something, im turned on nvidia gpu activity and whilst with other games it shows that they r using my nvidia card, witcher is the only one which doesnt, a i said i changed settings in nvidia control panel, and run the witcher with "run with graphic processor" and it still doesnt appear as being used
could you tell me step by step how to turn to my nvidia graphics card without doing anything stupid, like turning off my screen

This post has been edited by Foxford1: 13.02.2013 @ 16:40

[*Tommy*]

Foxford1 said:

yet another edit:
bigbadmclovin, i really think you are onto something, im turned on nvidia gpu activity and whilst with other games it shows that they r using my nvidia card, witcher is the only one which doesnt, a i said i changed settings in nvidia control panel, and run the witcher with "run with graphic processor" and it still doesnt appear as being used
could you tell me step by step how to turn to my nvidia graphics card without doing anything stupid, like turning off my screen /> ›››

1. Open NVIDIA Control Panel
2. Select: Advanced View
3. Navigate to: Manage 3D Settings
4. Select tab entitled: Program Settings
5. Use the "Add" button to find and add the .exe file(s) for the game(s)
you would like to use the Nvidia card for
6. Select the option "High Performance NVIDIA Processor"
7. Click on "Apply"
8. Exit the NVIDIA Control Panel

Make sure that you`re using the witcher 2 exe found in the witcher 2/bin folder and not the launcher exe .

[Foxford1]

The thing is i already tried that and it didnt work. At some point i begun to think that im just paranoid and the program just doesnt appear nvidia gpu activity (others do), when the weird thing happened. Hoping to be able to make it switch automatically from integrated gpu to nvidia i updated intel hd drivers, and surprisingly the fps rose by 5, so i think it really is using the wrong card, i just dont know how to disable the integrated and use just the other one without getting a black screen. Cannot fin and gpu/vga otions in my bios, and with device manager i got the result mentioned above.

[*Tommy*]

Is your laptop up to date from the manufacturer with all applicable software and drivers .

[Foxford1]

as far as i know yes. Asus live update states there is no need to update environment, i just updated bios and still had same results, both graphic cards were updated just now, and my pc had to restart just yesterday for windows, i cannot think of anything else. if there is anything else that might neeed updating then i dont know about it.

ps. just check my windows life update and it says it needs to update service pack, ill see how that works out.
managed to disable integrated gpu and as it turns out it is so integrated that one wont work without the other, i guess now its no longer a fps issue so ill probably seek help on other forums,or create a new thread. Still i would appreciated some solution to be suggested
Thanks a lot for all the help,

This post has been edited by Foxford1: 14.02.2013 @ 04:59

[KidCalvo]

I have de same problem with my notebook Dell XPS 502X, Core i7-2670 2.20GHz, Ram 8,0 GB, Nvidia GeForce GT540M 2 GB, with monitor Samsung TA550 (led 1080p) HDMI.
Every time resolusion change to 1440x900 automatic, I use to 1980x1020 for others game like F1 2012 and high spec.
All drives is uptodate and The Witch EE set to low spec. I can play, but is poorly. I expected more from my notebook, because other games get better performance.
P.S How can I see FPS?

[Foxford1]

download a program called FRAPS, its very handy.Also i started wondering whether it is possible to fix wrong gpu problem in nvidia inspector, if it is, does anyone have any ideas?