But 15.4 is also a beta, so what was the point?
Unless it broke something...

Only had to read three posts back mate, only three.

So with patch 1.04 I took a performance hit and now with the AMD 15.5 drivers I cannot even hit 60fps on the same settings. Running all medium and only at 1080p getting 40-55 fprs, obviously I don't bother with hairworks and have ssao on.
The game is playable unless in a big city then the stutter kicks it.
I still love this game but I hoped to get better performance on an R9 280x, my i5 is clocked at 4.2Ghz, 8Gb RAM but these don't appear to be enough for the game at the moment.

Yeah, that was pretty stupid on my part, apologies.

But how can you people argue so much when running with 45-60 fps? I can barely hit 30.

My bad, I didn't mean to sound like I was argumentative, just a little dissapointed that my performance has been decreasing steadily since the games launch. ;)

I didn't notice any performance boost, whatsoever. And neither did a german magazine. Their benchmarks showed 10% performance boost for Project Cras but only 2% for Witcher 3. Disappointing, I hoped for more...

I think the game is more GPU bound than CPU (at least your post kind of confirms it), if that's the case would you guys agree that i upgrade my HD 7770 instead of my Core 2 Quad?

The game is definitely more GPU bound than CPU. But I still don't see a point for you to upgrade just one of your components. This way you'll just get bottle necked by your CPU either way. Upgrade both. It's about time ;)

I see no difference in the performance with the new drivers with 7970 ghz. runs mostly 38-50 fps on most settings on high, shadows low, no hairworks. They took pretty long time with the driver like amd usually does without actually improving much at least for my card. But i have to say CD Projekt did really good job on their part, haven't had any crashes or other problems with the game.

I definitely noticed a FPS increase with new drivers. Was checking with MSI Afterburner and in a specific "scene" it went from 45-47 to 53-55 FPS with v15.5beta. (1080p, all ULTRA, foliage HIGH, Hairworks OFF - AMD R9 280 OC @1135/1350)

This makes me wonder if the CPU is where the performance is coming from, I have the same GPU but can in no way get up to 55fps on Ultra even without hairworks.

Use MSI Afterburner with Riva Tuner StatisticsServer (comes with the Afterburner). It showes live statistics in your game like GPU and CPU usage. This way you can see which part is limiting your fps.

I've been rolling back between the Omega 14.12's and 15.5 betas a few times on my R9 280x. I've finally decided to stick with the 14.12's as they seem to have a more consistent framerate.

What i've found with the 15.5's is that sometimes, you might be looking at something in the distance or just in a general direction and the frame rate will just drop 20% or so.

The 15.5's are slightly faster for me, but they seem to have unexptected frame drops (around 20%) which I usually fix by just looking in a different direction. Two cases I can recall:

Crookback Bog ~38fps -> 31fps (look around a bit and back to 38fps it goes)

North of Novigrad (Gustfields?) ~45fps -> 35fps (looking around doesn't seem to fix this, but bizzarely if I extend the tree render range the framerate goes back up to 45fps (FoliageDistanceScale=1 -> FoliageDistanceScale=1.2). Installing the Omega 14.12's keeps the framerate at a constant 45fps for the exact same location with the standard foilage distance.

Rolling back to the Omega drivers drops my maximum and even average framerate slightly, but I don't have those performance drops at times (I'm rather pedantic and have RadeonPro's FPS counter on 99% of the time I play the witcher 3. My favourite mini-game is to keep looking at the FPS counter when things start slowing down :)

Of course this could be due to any number of configuration issues on my machine, but it is pretty consistent switching between 14.12 and 15.5 beta (I've reinstalled the 15.5 driver about 3 times before deciding that 14.12 was the way for me to go).