I wrote an article about The Witcher 3 for PC Gamer. I focused primarily on some tips for achieving the smoothest possible gameplay, but what I’m really surprised by is the CPU results I obtained.

I might have chosen a bad location for that benchmark, and perhaps I’ll repeat it somewhere else, but I really expected an open world DX11 RPG to be more CPU-heavy. Certainly not playable with two 2.2 GHz cores at 30 FPS and 4 at 60 FPS. Very well done, and another indicator to me that seems to hint towards the gains with future low-level graphics APIs being less pronounced than some expect, outside of very specific use cases.

Of course, that level of control will at the very least be a huge boon to VR rendering, which inherently requires a high framerate, low-latency and extremely consistent performance.