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Hairworks & Witcher 3 - on or off?

Associate
Joined
11 Aug 2005
Posts
414
Location
Cambridge
With AMD cards the hit is pretty minor since you can cap the tessellation factor and lower the anti-aliasing on hair strands while still getting a good visual effect. Think you can only do the latter on nVidia cards.

So I run with hairworks on all on my 7870.
 
Associate
Joined
8 May 2014
Posts
2,288
Location
france
check driver to see if nvidia added an option to change tessellation complexity ?
i think i heard somewhere that they did but not sure.
 
Soldato
Joined
7 Aug 2013
Posts
3,510
It is adjustable, so it may be good or bad depending on your preferences.

For me, I turned it off. Solid 60fps was more important for me.

I think in terms of still image quality, it looks worse than having it off, even with high AA settings. As a regular screenshotter, this bothered me, and especially because you spend a lot of time seeing closeups of Geralt where it was most noticeable. Non-Hairworks hair looked better when still.

To make Hairworks not destroy your performance by up to 30-40%, you had to turn down quality level and AA. While Hairworks in its prime form looks fantastic in motion, its a shimmery mess at lower settings. As somebody who is sensitive to aliasing, this bothered me a lot.

My ultimate conclusion, for me personally of course, was that I could deal without Hairworks on Geralt completely and only have it for monsters. The big hunt monsters looked spectacular with Hairworks. But lowering the settings ruined a lot of this.

I could never really find a balance where I found it was worth it. Then again, I run a GTX970. If you had a 980 or especially a 980Ti, I'd probably have made the sacrifice and still been able to hit 60fps. At 1080p, at least....
 
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