Adjust the game settings for Witcher 3.
Adjust the game settings for Witcher 3.
I noticed that beside Hairwork, Foliage Visibility Range is the hardest hitter on the FPS, I run a 970, turning foliage visibility range to Ultra and/or turning on hairwork dump me from ~70 to 50-58. Most likely that beside hairwork, anything that relates to rendering distance will destroy framerate, I played around with the settings and most other settings did not have that much impact (Shadow and Ambient Occlusion probably will have higher impact than other settings, I believe). PS: I also noticed that non-Maxwell did take a hit, maybe a driver-downgrade to test (if you updated) or wait for a new driver. My friend runs a 770, I could've got something out of him... that is if he actually starts playing the game (I know, hard to believe he hasn't started the game despite having it installed for the past week, right?)
The recent patches improved performance significantly. I now achieve 35 to 40 FPS, with minor drops near 30 when everything is pushed to its limit. The stuttering has disappeared thanks to the Windows borderless feature. My current settings are: optimal configuration gives 45 FPS now. Hopefully, Nvidia will release the Kepler fix soon for even better frame rates!
I also observed better performance after the updates for your situation... it makes sense that you should see a noticeable improvement with the Optimal setting. Based on the benchmarks between the 970 and 760 models, your version tends to drop around 55 during rainy evenings or nights. When you look at both our configurations, reducing the setting would likely have kept your frame rate higher, staying above 50. Even Nvidia is acknowledging they're working to resolve this issue on older systems... it's a good point that this game has a long runtime.
This makes it sound a little like it could be related to Vsync. And I've seen other threads about this game where it sounded like vsync could be a source of framerate problems. Do you have it on in any of the cases you listed? Do you notice a difference in performance between fullscreen/windowed/borderless?