Excuse my dumb question, how do you install the game? I haven't had luck running Gog Galaxy (it doesn't download files), should I use the DRM-free install files downloaded one by one using the web browser?

use www gog

lgogdownloader is way better for such huge files, than using the browser.

@Shmerel save

velen "Hanged Man's tree" wine 2.11 staging nvidia blob

Excuse my dumb question, how do you install the game? I haven't had luck running Gog Galaxy (it doesn't download files), should I use the DRM-free install files downloaded one by one using the web browser?

Use lgogdownloader to get the files, and then install them in Wine.

Thanks, I'll give it a try! :)

velen "Hanged Man's tree" wine 2.11 staging nvidia blob

Does this look correct to you, or the ground is still too dark? It does seem better to me than what Mesa produces.

If it is Mesa bug, I'll post it to their bug tracker.

For newcomers, hope this could help others installing the game.

I used Manjaro and its package wine-staging-nine version 2.10, 64 bit. Used also playonlinux.

Downloaded the game using lgogdownloader:

lgogdownloader --download --game the_witcher_3_wild_hunt_game

This downloaded 26 files, with lots of extras, for nearly 43 GB of data. You should downloand only what's really needed.

Installation:

Launched Playonlinux, selected "manual installation", created a new 64-bit wine prefix using my system WINE, I havent installed anything, no libs, Dll: absolutely nothing. My default installation was set to "Windows 7".

When asked I then selected the file setup_the_witcher_3_wild_hunt_2.0.0.52.exe

Game installation started and finished in 10 minutes. When asked by the installer I choose "Exit", not "Launch the game". Playonlinux searched an executable to bind to the WINE prefix, I choose witcher3.exe, then this part of the installation finished.
I then installed the DLC file: selected the "witcher3" icon in playonlinux, then "configure" from the toolbar, then "Miscellaneous", then "Launch a program into the wine prefix" and choose the file setup_the_witcher3_dlc1-16_2.0.0.52.exe. When finished choose, as usual, "Exit".

Then I configured the WINE prefix: enabled "CSMT" using the "Staging" tab into the "WINE control panel", set the video memory amount. Then run the regedit and set the proper keys to enable OpenGL4.5 compatibility (see the Appdb page).

Run the game and everything worked as expected: there where the graphical glitches from Wine-staging 2.10, but that was expected.

Honestly everything went buttersmooth, I'm impressed!

EDIT: fixed some typos.

Run the game and everything worked as expected: there where the graphical glitches from Wine-staging 2.10, but that was expected.

Honestly everything went buttersmooth, I'm impressed!

It's good that it worked, but you should really use 2.11, or build Wine from source otherwise (see howto on the AppDB page). sample_c_lz patch makes a huge difference.

WARNING: HEAVY SCREENSHOT POST

Screenshots are from Wine 2.11 Staging, Nvidia Drivers 375.66 GTX 1060 6GB - Mint 18

FPS Test on Medium details average 22-30 in most areas, some stones on the floor appear to be garbled/messed up shape:

Some floor texture bugs still remain, from my testing this will mostly occur when there's an area under that floor in this case a cave inside the well:

This is a screenshot inside the well, the texture bug appears only from one side:

Foliage screenshot, most of it works good but everytime I close and reopen the game I have to set the setting from the options otherwise only the branches will appear (aka Wasteland mode):

The Cave exit from inside (underwater):

The Above Cave door but from the outside, the highlighted area is supposed to be invisible but shows a texture instead (you can swim through it):

That's it for now, far as I can tell AMD Mesa users are getting the better experience so far, Shmerl's screenshots show high FPS and as far as I know both the RX480 and the GTX 1060 are very close in performance.

Another thing I noticed - With the game set to use cores 0-7 (Ryzen 1700X), I was having a lot of microstuttering, setting it to 0-5 helped a bit. May not work the same for everyone but it does help in my case.

Some floor texture bugs still remain, from my testing this will mostly occur when there's an area under that floor in this case a cave inside the well:

Yes, the missing floor bug is this one: https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43131

Please add your findings there. For the list of other open bugs see: https://bugs.winehq.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch="witcher 3"

If you don't see your bug, please open a new one.

Also, did you experiment with __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS (variable for Nvidia's blob)? Try setting it on and off and see if it helps anything.

Regarding some stuttering. Using GALLIUM_HUD, I added metrics for disk I/O, and noticed that some stuttering correlates to spikes in disk reading. Most probably the game is loading some resources on the fly, which can cause slowdowns. I bet using an SSD can mitigate some of that (I'm using regular HDD).

GALLIUM_HUD is really a great tool.

Some fun with extracting music from the game.

I'm also getting pretty bad performance with a Nvidia system on this game (R1600 with 980ti), around 20-35 FPS typically using 2.11 staging and CSMT. I did find that disabling threaded-ops helped a little, but locking to a single CCX (0-5 or 6-11) did not. Deus EX HR is the only game that I've seen so far that benefits from a single CCX actually, but it's a rather large boost (20+%).

At least it's a clear case, where Mesa performs much better than Nvidia blob.

@Shemerl Maybe this place(ground) is too dark. https://youtu.be/cCtfSXbwovk?t=11m50s

Playing this with the Nvidia blob and staging (csmt enabled) seems mostly good. There are some weird performance drops that cause input to get momentarily stuck which is aggravating (lowering resolution helps a little).

The biggest flaws so far are:

* Hairworks is not functional (known bug)

* SSAO produces weird artifacts all over the screen (HBAO+ is flawless however)

* A few occasional spots where a black polygon with an odd surface appears over the environment (known bug)

* And the most annoying is that after loading a save or any time an in-engine cutscene starts it appears a specific shader (not sure which) is either dropped completely or inverted giving everything a really odd appearance which I forgot to take a screencap of. Changing any graphical setting will fix this, even something like changing Hairworks to High or Low when it is disabled. Unfortunately I had to install a mod to allow opening the menu during cutscenes. There is no graphical preset which gets around this by default.

@Shemerl Maybe this place(ground) is too dark. https://youtu.be/cCtfSXbwovk?t=11m50s

I think it's just too dark. If you compare it to a Windows video, you see that lighting is not right at all in that scene and the scenes that follow.

I personally don't care about hairworks, since it's reportedly never works well om AMD hardware anyway (no hardware acceleration). But if it doesn't work on Nvidia as well, that must be a bug.

@Shemerl Maybe this place(ground) is too dark. https://youtu.be/cCtfSXbwovk?t=11m50s

This video is also using AMD (RX 460). I'll report it to Mesa developers anyway for now. If it's invalid, they'll close it.

I personally don't care about hairworks, since it's reportedly never works well om AMD hardware anyway (no hardware acceleration). But if it doesn't work on Nvidia as well, that must be a bug.

I guess I'd say that things working "well" will happen over time, but they should work at all. :D


Edit: For whatever reason if I set/force threaded optimizations to 0 I get slightly better performance even though as far as I know they aren't supposed to be enabled by default anymore. Could just be a fluke.

Edit: For whatever reason if I set/force threaded optimizations to 0 I get slightly better performance even though as far as I know they aren't supposed to be enabled by default anymore. Could just be a fluke.

Nvidia uses some auto-detecion method for it, and it's not always making best decisions. Interestingly, with Mesa threaded dispatch improves performance, and with Nvidia blob it's the opposite.