To anyone who has played it - does it look a lot better than say, Witcher 3 or Elden Ring? Because in the footage and photos I’m not seeing much that explains why it’s so hardware-intensive. If you told me this came out 5 years ago I’d probably believe you based off the graphics in the review I watched.
It’s all about art direction and style. From what I’ve played in DD2, it’s very much the first game but more complex NPCs, which is my own bottleneck. My poor i7-4790k can’t handle staying in Vernworth for more than 5 mins lmao. I do like how much attention the art direction got in the castle, was legit jaw dropping first glance. The graphics definitely isn’t that much of an issue.
I personally still vastly prefer Elden Ring’s wonderfully twisted style, same with anything From puts out. And I can play them on my potato.
By today’s standards, that’s a pretty weak CPU at this point. I upgraded from mine not long after the Gamers Nexus review that pegged it at about the same performance as a 10th gen i3. I was already planning to upgrade at that point, but it really was a kicker.
I don’t think it’s particularly gpu intensive like you’d expect for a graphically intense game, there’s a heavy cpu bottleneck due to Npc calculations, some have suggested due to a lot of physics calculations with npcs. The npcs also have severe pop in issues in the city. For most people playing this the gpu isn’t going to be the issue. Even the most powerful gaming cpus are only able to take it so far in its current state though.
Some of it probably is Denuvo, which has a serious performance impact. IIRC it encrypts the assets in ram which needs to be unencrypted when needed, causing heavy CPU usage and performance loss.
Can’t say much about how it likely impacts this game in particular, I haven’t played it.
My GPU is a GeForce RTX 2700S and my CPU is exactly the minimum spec, an AMD Ryzen 5 3600, and I’m able to play at a stable 30FPS with only occasional stutters when loading a new chunk in a big city. In my 50+ hours played, I haven’t once had performance negatively impact my experience.
Edit: With the latest game update, I now get 60FPS while exploring and 40-50FPS in cities.
It looks much better than elden ring in that all the models are much higher quality. Elden Ring was designed around relatively modest assets, and does wonders with what it has, but there is no comparison, DD2 wins hands-down.
As for art direction, that is subjective. Plenty of reasons to prefer looking at ER.
The Witcher 3 is almost a decade old at this point