I recently bought The Witcher 2 from Steam because it was on sale and it
has received very positive reviews from both critics and the public.

Now, my current PC might not be the absolute top-of-the-line, but it's
in no way a slouch either. Crysis? Hah, gimme a break. Skyrim? All
graphical settings on full, and smooth like silk, no problems whatsoever.
Crysis 2? Almost all graphical settings on full (just a couple of them
on second-to-max) and it runs smoothly.

The Witcher 2? The auto-detection system suggest the *minimum* possible
graphical settings for *everything*. And for a good reason! I can't make
them much higher before it starts lagging noticeably. (Needless to say,
if I put everything to max, the game is completely unplayable.)

Are you freaking kidding me? Even games like Crysis 2 and Skyrim don't
demand even a small fraction of that in their *top* graphical settings.
This game is as heavy as those on its *minimal* graphical settings!

Granted, the game has some pretty advanced new graphical innovations
that require a lot of resources, but it's not just them. All the other
more "traditional" settings (such as texture sizes, shadow quality,
LOD distance and so on) have to also be either at minimum or almost
minimum, or turned completely off, if I want it to run at a playable
framerate.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
> I recently bought The Witcher 2 from Steam because it was on sale and it
> has received very positive reviews from both critics and the public.
>
> Now, my current PC might not be the absolute top-of-the-line, but it's
> in no way a slouch either. Crysis? Hah, gimme a break. Skyrim? All
> graphical settings on full, and smooth like silk, no problems whatsoever.
> Crysis 2? Almost all graphical settings on full (just a couple of them
> on second-to-max) and it runs smoothly.

it's the new crysis :)

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Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
> The Witcher 2? The auto-detection system suggest the *minimum* possible
> graphical settings for *everything*. And for a good reason! I can't make
> them much higher before it starts lagging noticeably. (Needless to say,
> if I put everything to max, the game is completely unplayable.)

> Are you freaking kidding me? Even games like Crysis 2 and Skyrim don't
> demand even a small fraction of that in their *top* graphical settings.
> This game is as heavy as those on its *minimal* graphical settings!

I read on the internets a tip that apparently if you have NVidia's
3D-Vision driver installed, it causes a big slowdown in The Witcher 2
for some reason, and that uninstalling said driver should help.

I tried uninstalling it, and put the game to the test: I turned almost
all settings on (including most of the "useless" settings, such as depth
of field, that I had to had off because I had to cut features to get a
decent framerate) and to maximum ("Ultra") and started the game...
And what do you know... It runs smooth as silk.

And man, does it look gorgeous. For example the volumetric light effects
are simply astounding (for example when you look directly at the sun
through a foggy atmosphere, every geometric detail obstructs the light
rays as they should...)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
> And man, does it look gorgeous. For example the volumetric light effects
> are simply astounding (for example when you look directly at the sun
> through a foggy atmosphere, every geometric detail obstructs the light
> rays as they should...)

yeah

then again, those are not perfect math curves

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>> And man, does it look gorgeous. For example the volumetric light effects
>> are simply astounding (for example when you look directly at the sun
>> through a foggy atmosphere, every geometric detail obstructs the light
>> rays as they should...)
>
> yeah
>
> then again, those are not perfect math curves

Nobody has got a monitor capable of displaying perfect math curves yet :-)

Seriously though, if your goal is to create a bitmap representation of 
the math curve, what difference does it make if you check every pixel in 
the image to see if it lies on the curve, or you convert the curve into 
a list of pixel-sized straight lines and then colour those pixels? 
Different maths but same result.

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scott <sco### [at] scottcom> wrote:
> >> And man, does it look gorgeous. For example the volumetric light effects
> >> are simply astounding (for example when you look directly at the sun
> >> through a foggy atmosphere, every geometric detail obstructs the light
> >> rays as they should...)
> >
> > yeah
> >
> > then again, those are not perfect math curves
>
> Nobody has got a monitor capable of displaying perfect math curves yet :-)
>
> Seriously though, if your goal is to create a bitmap representation of
> the math curve, what difference does it make if you check every pixel in
> the image to see if it lies on the curve, or you convert the curve into
> a list of pixel-sized straight lines and then colour those pixels?
> Different maths but same result.

sorry, I was impersonating Andrew

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> sorry, I was impersonating Andrew

I thought that was maybe the case at first, but you needed a :-)

:-)

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On 24/01/2013 09:40 AM, scott wrote:
> Seriously though, if your goal is to create a bitmap representation of
> the math curve, what difference does it make if you check every pixel in
> the image to see if it lies on the curve, or you convert the curve into
> a list of pixel-sized straight lines and then colour those pixels?
> Different maths but same result.

Sure. But nobody does that yet.

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>> Seriously though, if your goal is to create a bitmap representation of
>> the math curve, what difference does it make if you check every pixel in
>> the image to see if it lies on the curve, or you convert the curve into
>> a list of pixel-sized straight lines and then colour those pixels?
>> Different maths but same result.
>
> Sure. But nobody does that yet.

It's pretty much there though, not like the 90's where you got triangles 
100 pixels wide on supposedly curved shapes. Arguably you're never going 
to get to the exact situation where every triangle is 1 pixel wide 
because nobody will notice the improvement over a small amount of 
approximation, and it's thus better to spend the GPU time on other effects.

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On 25/01/2013 02:31 PM, scott wrote:
>>> Seriously though, if your goal is to create a bitmap representation of
>>> the math curve, what difference does it make if you check every pixel in
>>> the image to see if it lies on the curve, or you convert the curve into
>>> a list of pixel-sized straight lines and then colour those pixels?
>>> Different maths but same result.
>>
>> Sure. But nobody does that yet.
>
> It's pretty much there though, not like the 90's where you got triangles
> 100 pixels wide on supposedly curved shapes. Arguably you're never going
> to get to the exact situation where every triangle is 1 pixel wide
> because nobody will notice the improvement over a small amount of
> approximation, and it's thus better to spend the GPU time on other effects.

It depends. If you're doing something like hair simulation, hairs with 
right-angle kinks in them are very, very noticeable. If it's something 
like a distant rock face or something, you're probably not paying much 
attention to it, and the rock texturing will probably hide it, mostly...

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