That Keira bug didn't happen for me. I guess it is very rare.

Also, some game bugs are hardware specific. Like that dwarf with missing arms. Only happens on Nvidia and not on AMD.

I was able to reproduce the Keira bug on AMD (with dxvk, wined3d, as well as native windows 10 - just happens everywhere), they probably screwed that up with one of the patches. Blue line doesn't happen on my end though.

So the Keira bug was a game bug then. Good to have that confirmed.

Despite using the tsched=0 command in /etc/pulse/default.pa as mentioned previously, I've had some more sound issues lately. A cutscene (one of those rare ones with a storyteller) was crackling all over the place, and a few other times it has started crackling during normal gameplay. Have anybody else experienced it, and how did you solve it?

A cutscene (one of those rare ones with a storyteller) was crackling all over the place, and a few other times it has started crackling during normal gameplay. Have anybody else experienced it, and how did you solve it?

It's possibly just a buggy audio hardware / ALSA driver combination. One option is to find a dedicated audio card supported on Linux if you have a free PCIe slot (besides just upgrading to some modern motherboard).

The motherboard isn't that ancient, and in any case I won't be purchasing new hardware as a test to see whether it works better or not. I'm not that rich. Thankfully the sound issue doesn't happen very often, and when it does I can just restart the game and it's back in working order. I was thinking it might be a driver issue, or unideal settings somewhere, but I'm sadly not knowledgeable enough to try to figure it out myself. But like I said, it's okay the way it is really, just figured I'd ask here if somebody else had similar issues.

It's a joy to play, and I'm very glad DXVK works as well as it does :)

Funny little thing I came across; probably another game issue, and not Linux/DXVK/whatever. I found a few flying drowners. Walk a little closer and they drop into the ocean, but I found it amusing.



Some scenes in the game look utterly gruesome. This one actually made me a little sick.


I took a screenshot the last time I was testing the Keira Metz bug:


4 years later and this game looks one of the best I've ever played.

It is head and shoulders the most gorgeous-looking game I've ever played. Admittedly I haven't played a lot of new games since they are often either tied to steam or not supported on Linux, but I am genuinely impressed by what I'm seeing. Especially the faces and details in facial expressions. Or the level of detail in general. Yesterday I was down on a beach in the evening, with the sun setting, and suddenly I notice some crabs scurrying across the sand, walking sideways. Incredible.

Some more pictures that I really enjoyed (yours look fantastic). The first one actually made my stomach turn (I'm not comfortable in heights), which is unheard of in a game.



Would look better had I turned off all the UI, but I do like the minimap (although it should be more zoomed out).

In the UI HUD I like to turn off quest description / objective. It's just too cluttering and you can easily look up current quest if you need.

Hmm, another "first ever" occurred. Had just sold and bought some books from the books vendor in Novigrad, and while in the inventory (in the sell/buy screens) I flipped to another 'tab' to see if he would be willing to buy anything else, and for what prices -- when all the items in the tabs disappeared and some of the graphics started flickering. After I exited the merchant windows I noticed Geralt was flickering about once every five seconds, and it was much the same when in the Character/Inventory screen.

Saved the game and went back to the main menu and reloaded the same. Same thing happened, so Geralt was flickering. All items showed in the various tabs, though. Then I restarted the game and all appears to be functioning as normal again. Since it didn't reproduce after restarting the game, the save is probably fine, but I've uploaded in case you manage to get anything useful out of it.
https://megaupload.nz/7ad9E2v4b5/Geralt-flickering.tar_gz

Possibly just some weird outlier, but figured I'd mention it here nevertheless.

You can press the Home key to toggle the HUD when taking screenshots, FYI.

@Pangaea: see https://forums.cdprojektred.com/index.php?threads/bugged-keira.10999783

@Pangaea: see https://forums.cdprojektred.com/index.php?threads/bugged-keira.10999783

Thanks. That forum sure has changed a lot since I was active there years and years ago (I was in love with the first game). I've actually noticed some spelling mistakes and minor stuff like that, but at this point I suppose they are done patching the game. Would be nice if they fixed the Keira bug, but I'm not really expecting anything for such a minor thing which is very far from a show-stopper.

It's actually more annoying that we can't talk to the blacksmith in Blackbough without first meditating in the area. And a few times it's been impossible to complete various "open secret door" or suchlike interactions without restarting the game or reloading a save. I spent ever so long trying to open the secret door in the "tower mice" mission (from the above-mentioned Keira bug), including walking all over the island trying to find more spots for ghosts to interact with. Eventually I simply gave up and reloaded a save, and the 'door' opened right away. Stuff like that would be more important to fix as it has real consequences, and I don't think this is Linux or DXVK-related.

Regarding meditation by the way, I recommend this mod which is quite nice:

https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/2067/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vntc3Sfd50g

It makes meditation in the game into something actually interesting.

Don't know if this affects anything in the Witcher 3, as it runs more or less perfectly already, but I got notified about an Nvidia driver upgrade (to 418.43), which contains this in the changelog:

• Fixed a bug that would occasionally cause visual corruption on some Vulkan titles. This bug was particularly prevalent on DXVK titles.

Thanks for the tip about that mod. I'm not using it yet, but it looks pretty nice. Have thought about a mod that zooms out the minimap a bit, as it's not very useful that zoomed in, but for now the only mod I've employed is one that disabled the storybooks videos when loading saves. Those got annoying pretty fast, albeit really cool the first time I saw it.

It's generally a good idea to always keep drivers up to date, unless there are known regressions. So just update to every new version that comes out.

The newest release of amdvlk Vulkan driver is finally handling TW3 without crashing. Performance is slightly better than radv:

amdvlk:


radv:


If using amdvlk, don't forget to enable disk shader cache, it's off by default (only runtime cache is used if you don't enable it):

in
$HOME/.config/amdPalSettings.cfg
ShaderCacheMode 2

Cache is stored in: $HOME/.cache/AMD/LlpcCache

That's nice and all, but amdvlk has broken rendering on my Polaris GPU. Sometimes it renders seemingly random geometry, and since the latest update, vegetation has flickering squares on it.

On RADV you can improve performance by setting dxvk.useEarlyDiscard = True. This is enabled by default for ANV as well as AMDVLK and the -PRO driver, but not for RADV because it triggers a GPU hang in Nier. Yields one or two FPS when there's a lot of vegetation on screen.

That's nice and all, but amdvlk has broken rendering on my Polaris GPU. Sometimes it renders seemingly random geometry, and since the latest update, vegetation has flickering squares on it.

Looks like some reported other issues with Polaris and amdvlk in TW3 as well:
https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers/AMDVLK/issues/74

On RADV you can improve performance by setting dxvk.useEarlyDiscard = True. This is enabled by default for ANV as well as AMDVLK and the -PRO driver, but not for RADV because it triggers a GPU hang in Nier. Yields one or two FPS when there's a lot of vegetation on screen.

Interesting, I'll give it a try. Does it hang with any other games? Could be some llvm/amdgpu bug.

Adding dxvk.useEarlyDiscard = True helped a bit for radv (around +1 fps for me on average). amdvlk is still a bit ahead (+3 fps to radv with early discard). That's not a lot, so they are comparable, which shows that radv is in good shape overall.

I'm also using a kernel with bulk moves in amdgpu, which were disabled in 5.0. I hope they'll come back before 5.1 release:

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/amd/amdgpu/amdgpu_vm.c#n655