Hello,

I have been researching a solution to this issue for quite a while now..off and on. When I approach any villages/towns there is brief frame skipping/pausing/stuttering caused by the NPCs being popped into the area. Is there a way to increase memory size so that NPCs don't have to be continually loaded into the game?

Once I've visited the different areas of the town including Novigrad and all NPCs have popped in, no more stutter. I play on all Ultra settings, but this is one of the cases where changing all settings to "Low" does nothing either.

You give no clue, but it sounds like you don't have enough video RAM, or there's a bottleneck.

Firstly, this is a true AAA game. Love it.

My System:

I7 Intel 3.4ghz Haswell
XFX R9 290 4GB Vram
16GB Memory Ram
SSD 512 Samsung EVO 850

Only gaming on 1080P. Vram is not an issue.I discovered the close range NPC pop-in had been a wide known problem from patch 1.04 and up (got worse after 1.07). I am moving my concern over to the dev forums where most are aware of this issue. As I thought, not hardware related but more having to do with the technical side of the game.

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Update: For anyone having issues with NPCs popping/loading frequently do the following:
Source: CD Projeckt Red Forums

8. Fix texture pop-in on characters

Patch 1.07 introduced some heavy texture pop-in on characters, which can be incredibly distracting at times! To remedy this issue, if not solve it altogether, navigate to your "...Documents/The Witcher 3" folder, open the "user.settings" file with a text editor (e.g. Notepad), then tweak the following parameters:

[Rendering]
TextureStreamingHeadsDistanceLimit=160
TextureStreamingReduceGameplayLOD=false
TextureStreamingCharacterDistanceLimit=320

Bear in mind that you will need to manually add TextureStreamingReduceGameplayLOD=false under the [Rendering] section of your "user.settings" file yourselves, because the game does not include it by default!

Sources: Asmodean778, vesemas228, KRZYCH04650

9. Fix stuttering caused by too frequent garbage collection

The game uses a garbage collection algorithm to clear up assets that are no longer required as you play the game, but its low default upper memory limit can cause stuttering in crowded places, most notably Novigrad. To force garbage collection to trigger less frequently and thus reduce/eliminate its associated stuttering, navigate to "...\The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt\bin\config\base" and open "gc.ini" with a text editor (e.g. Notepad), then find and tweak the following variable:

ObjectMemoryTrigger=512

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