The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt CPU Benchmark Test: FX 6300/8350 vs i7 4790K/i5 4690K/i3 4130/G3258 OC

00:00 G3258 (4.5GHz) vs i3 4130/i5 4690K/i7 4790K - 01:12 CPU stress test in Novigrad City
02:16 i3/i5 vs FX 6300/8350 Intel in the lead - 03:28 CPU stress test, AMD gets back in the game
Subscribe for more console and PC tech analysis:
For the most part, The Witcher 3 is extremely well optimised and runs well with virtually any decent CPU. The first section of the video demonstrates how the same CPU can still drive the Titan X to almost the same degree.
But once we hit 01:12 - a tour of Novigrad City on horseback... well, then we see some big changes. This area can hit 80% utilisation across all eight threads on a Core i7 4790K! The less powerful the CPU here, the more CPU stutter you encounter. The G3258 - overclocked to 4.5GHz - doesn't work out too well.
Also, check out the performance of the FX-6300 and FX-8350 starting from 01:26. In the initial cut-scenes they fall a little short of the Core i3 and i5, but once we hit the heavy Novigrad area, they compete very nicely - the FX 6300 moves ahead of the i3, while the FX 8350 is very close to the 4690K.
So, is this CPU stutter found in the Novigrad stress test a cause for concern? Well, not really. Most in-game stutter is caused when the CPU - not the GPU - is the bottleneck (and that's what we are testing here). As long as you pair your more budget-orientated CPU with an appropriate GPU, you'll hit the GPU limit first - and typically that doesn't cause stutter. And in the case of The Witcher 3, most of the game is GPU-limited (as seen in the first couple of cut-scenes tested here). With that final stress test scene, you'll note that the 4790K is well-matched with the Titan X, the CPU isn't really the bottleneck and thus the latencies are much more consistent.
Across all three scenes, the benchmarks work out as follows (low/avg) but do check out the CPU stress test scene to get a better idea of latency and performance under load. A benchmark sums up performance with a single number, but real-life can be a bit more complicated than that:
Core i7 4790K - 65.0/84.4
Core i5 4690K - 52.0/79.2
Core i3 4130 - 38.0/68.9
G3258 at 4.5GHz OC - 27.0/63.8
FX 8350 - 56.0/75.2
FX 6300 - 45.0/69.6