The Witcher 3 is generally an easy game to run, with plenty of scalability built into the engine. However, at its ultra settings and galloping at speed through dense areas like Novigrad, the tech is tested on multiple levels. First of all, the CPU is given a thorough work-out, and this tends to scale with memory bandwidth from your DDR4. Secondly, you can actually be storage-bound here - I've spotted stutter here running on an at-capacity entry-level SSD. However, as things stand, this title shows a 10 per cent advantage to the 9900K over its 8700K rival, while the lead over Ryzen is remarkable.
Again, 1440p resolution can see performance improvements between the three processors but as expected, the performance numbers close up as the GPU takes more of a role in proceedings. At 4K, the CPUs are effectively like for like - as you would expect - but the Ryzen does have more of a propensity to stutter. In general, stutter can be mitigated by setting a frame-rate ceiling appropriate to the hardware you have and even in Novigrad, a 60fps limit helps matters immensely.