The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - i5 4690K & GTX 1070 - FPS Test and Settings

Описание: Greetings, everyone.

Today’s been my first day using my new GTX 1070 and since I’ve made several videos testing some interesting games with my good old 770, I wanted to do similar videos with the 1070, at least for the most important games that I own and especially those game where some minor tweaks here and there might yield interesting frame rate gains that might benefit anyone using similar hardware.

Before getting into business, my current PC specs are the following:

-CPU: i5 [email protected] GHz with Coolermaster Hyper 212 EVO.
-Mobo: Asus Maximus VII Ranger (Z97).
-GPU: Inno3D Twin X2 GTX 1070 (stock) and latest WHQL driver (372.90).
-RAM: 16 GB DDR3@1866, 9-10-9-28.
-Storage: Kingston SSDNow 300, 240 GB where both game and O.S. are installed.
-O.S: Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64bit with latest updates.
-Running at 1080p-144Hz native, other resolutions tested using DSR.

So far my experience testing my new 1070 has been quite awesome, even on my i5 CPU the 1070 delivers a lot of performance but, as we know, The Witcher 3 is a huge game that can put quite a strain on both our CPU and GPU, and we’ll see a few moments in the video where it’s my CPU the one that struggles the most in…you guessed it, Novigrad; That city is awesome in every possible way, but that means performance hiccups now and then when running around. It happened when I made my testing videos using my old GTX 770, and with the 1070 the issue is still there and even a bit worse because the 1070 is a lot more powerful and Novigrad just destroys CPUs with 4 physical cores and no Hyperthreading, like the i5s.

But other than that, outside the big city the game runs incredibly smooth on my system, as we can see in the video. I tested 1080p with all the quality presets and with and without hairworks and certainly the 1070 is powerful enough to deliver decent and smooth frame rates even with Hairworks enabled.

Although we still can do the same tweaks we did back when I made my GTX 770 videos for this game, like lowering Foliage Distance from Ultra to High usually yields 10 extra FPS which come quite handy when we want to enable Hairworks and stay above 60 FPS, and indeed we can with the 1070. Furthermore, if we use the Low Hairworks preset, we can get a few extra FPS more, which is nice and it looks almost the same as the higher preset.

But the power of the GTX 1070 is just starting to show at 1080p, yeah it’s a good GPU if you want to play at full HD on high refresh rate monitors, because in most games it can deliver 3 digit frame rate figures, indeed but, as we can see in the gameplay, resolutions like 1440p are no problem for the 1070 either in The Witcher 3, the game looks amazing at this resolution even if it was just me using DSR and not true proper native 1440p, but still looks good, and we can maintain 60 FPS at Ultra, that’s cool; now for those who want even more FPS, we can see that lowering again the Foliage Distance to High will keep the game above 70 FPS most of the time, and we can even enable Hairworks and stay around 60 FPS.

Ultra HD AKA 4K is another story, it’s hard to achieve 60 FPS with a 1070 in this game at 4K, but with some tweaks we can stay around 40, not bad and keep in mind my GPU is at stock speeds.

Overall, I can safely say that if you want to play this game close to 100 FPS with no Hairworks, everything else maxed, you can with a 1070, definitely, and with Hairworks enabled you can play above 70 FPS most of the time, all this in full HD of course. But the 1070 also keeps its chin quite high at 1440p in this game, so if you are thinking on which GPU to get for games like this, with some “future-proofness” and in case you switch to a bigger monitor later on, the 1070 is at that sweet spot today: excellent for 1080p high FPS gaming and very good for 1440p above 60 FPS. Now for just 60 Hz gaming at 1080p, the GTX 1060 is good choice too, but keep in mind that GPU will suffer a lot more at 1440p+ in very demanding titles, but still a good GPU the 1060 is, for 60 FPS/Hz entry level gaming, or the Rx 480 if you prefer AMD, fills that role well enough too.

I hope this video can be useful to any of you, and I’ll see you in the next one : )