The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Publisher: CD Projekt RED

From our The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt review:

'But these flaws don't even come close to undermining CD Projekt's achievements in the Witcher 3. It's the culmination of a lengthy improvement process over three games. The Witcher proved they could make an interesting game, and the Witcher II proved they could make an intelligent and entertaining game. The Witcher 3 does something entirely different. It relieves CD Projekt of the burden of proof, and places it squarely on the shoulders of every other RPG developer working in the industry today. That's how good it is. Consider the bar officially raised.'

The Witcher 3 is an extremely demanding game. As such, we test using the 'High' preset rather than the 'Ultra' one, as the visual difference between them is small. However, we disable Nvidia HairWorks due to its massive performance impact. We also use the 'High' preset for the postprocessing effects, which is the highest possible setting. The benchmark is a 45 second recording of a manual playthrough in the level Lilac and Gooseberries, where we run on horseback up to and through a village just after Geralt has first encountered a Griffin. There's plenty of water, shadows and lighting to deal with and a good amount of people, buildings and foilage to render as well.