Witcher3 Doesn't work on Laptop

[Enjay]

Bit of a last-ditch attempt here but, who knows, some one on here might have an insight that has escaped everyone else that I've asked.



A few weeks ago we (not the royal we, we as in it's a family machine) got a new laptop to help with working from home. It's a good, but not absolutely top of the range, spec gaming laptop. It's certainly good enough to play the Witcher3 though.

I installed (and patched) The Witcher 3 on it (yeah, I said working from home ) and... it doesn't work.

When I try to run it, there is a moment or two while things are loading, the screen goes blank for a short period of time (<1 second) and then... nothing. I'm just back at the desktop or GoG galaxy (depending on how I tried to start it). The brief black flash appears at roughly the time I would normally expect the game to switch to its own visuals (gauging that against how it starts on my desktop PC).

I have tried searching through forums for advice and I have contacted CD Project Red's help and... nothing. I have spent literally hours downloading, re-downloading and trying to get it to work. Nothing. I had a dialogue over several emails with CDPR and eventually they just gave up. There is nothing particularly odd about the laptop - all pretty good industry standard stuff.

Laptop is
Win10 64 bit
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-10300H CPU @ 2.50GHz (8 CPUs), ~2.5GHz
16384MB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650
Realtek High Definition Audio

I have tried the following:

Ensuring all drivers for the machine are up to date
Running as admin (galaxy and witcher3 exe)
Running in various compatibility modes
disabling nVidia experience
verifying integrity through galaxy
repairing install
running sfc /scannow
disabling antivirus
clean booting
deleting gog.dll
a fresh uninstall/re-install
setting fullscreen mode to 1 by editing the preferences file
Reinstalled Visual C++ Redistributable Packages (using links provided by CDPR)
Removed GoG galaxy and reinstalled The Witcher3 from the offline backup installer
Tried installing on SSD and HDD.
Rolling back the updates

The laptop does have an onboard Intel graphics card too but it is properly set up to use the nVidia card and I have also tried setting the startup options for the Witcher3 to only use the nVidia option and tried running the game from Within the nVidia experience program (which sets game specific options for the Witcher3).

Plenty of other games work. The Witcher3 is the only one that has caused a problem.

[Nash]

Not sure if this may help but I ran into a similar issue when I setup a fresh machine (fresh OS, fresh hardware, everything) for my girlfriend recently. Installed some games on Steam and they just... wouldn't start. What fixed them was to download the prerequisites for said games - DirectX, Visual Studio runtimes, things like that. Steam usually does this for you automatically but for whatever strange reason, it didn't.

As for finding what exactly I needed had to be searched on a game-by-game basis. Not terribly difficult, just time consuming and annoying.

It varies from game to game - sometimes, all I needed was the DirectX package, sometimes I needed both DirectX and VS runtimes.

Again, not sure if this may be the cause of your problems, but something to consider.

[Kinsie]

Not sure if this may help but I ran into a similar issue when I setup a fresh machine (fresh OS, fresh hardware, everything) for my girlfriend recently. Installed some games on Steam and they just... wouldn't start. What fixed them was to download the prerequisites for said games - DirectX, Visual Studio runtimes, things like that. Steam usually does this for you automatically but for whatever strange reason, it didn't.

As for finding what exactly I needed had to be searched on a game-by-game basis. Not terribly difficult, just time consuming and annoying.

It varies from game to game - sometimes, all I needed was the DirectX package, sometimes I needed both DirectX and VS runtimes.

Again, not sure if this may be the cause of your problems, but something to consider.

For context, this is what Steam installs when running its version of The Witcher 3 for the first time, according to SteamDB:
VC 2012 Redist
VC 2013 Redist
DirectX Jun 2010 Redist

[sinisterseed]

Not sure if this may help but I ran into a similar issue when I setup a fresh machine (fresh OS, fresh hardware, everything) for my girlfriend recently. Installed some games on Steam and they just... wouldn't start. What fixed them was to download the prerequisites for said games - DirectX, Visual Studio runtimes, things like that. Steam usually does this for you automatically but for whatever strange reason, it didn't.

Was about to just suggest this.

They do typically auto install on a fresh copy of the OS, but sometimes they may not be sufficient because the OS they were made for might have already shipped with something that W10 no longer does, or is disabled by default. The DirectX redist in particular can be problematic since what is sometimes shipped is the online version (dxwebsetup), which tries to be smart but really isn't, no, you want the classic offline deal. I would also recommend paying attention to .NET Frameworks in particular. Some older games require .NET Framework 2.0 for instance, but this is now a legacy component under W8.1 and 10 which requires manual re-activation, games won't automatically toggle it back on, you have to do that yourself.

[Enjay]

Reinstalled Visual C++ Redistributable Packages (using links provided by CDPR)

The links that they provided were the links to the versions that have been suggested. I also installed DirectX Jun 2010 but forgot to mention it above.

I'll double check the .net framework versions on the machine. I think it's OK too though. I remember installing some additional .net framework stuff.

[Dancso]

Have you tried regular windowed mode? Maybe there's a config file option for it

[Enjay]

Yup, full screen, borderless window and windowed.

[PlayerLin]

Sounds like CTDs on loading but happens before the game actually loaded and starts...
But too bad never played this game cannot give any advise...

I did dealt with lot of CTD problems when playing heavy modded Skyrim(32bit DX9 version), it's really, really hard to find the problem since no error messages or something, game engine just doesn't like something and crashed, missing dependence files, too many references, too many shit running the same time, something got "null-ed" when the game still needed that, or even too much memory would trigger crashing, how annoying...


Well, I try google-ing and found a old steam-forum post about a user get the same problem and he reverted to older version of NVidia driver and works but he was using 1080Ti and 382.05 won't working on GTX 16xx cards but the idea was, not latest version of driver will always working on every game(it may broken or something went wrong on later or latest ones), I try used your spec on NVidia driver site and it gives some result, the oldest one was from end of last year (441.66), maybe you can try that version first, and see if it helps or not.