I found that the keyboard and mouse upgrade were the key to fixing this problem. Use game setting options to turn off "difficult QTE's;" then upgrade to USB 2.0 Hardware: at least a 2000DPI mouse with Medium-High settings and a modern gaming keyboard. The replacements cost me about US$70.00. (an old version MS Sidewinder Keyboard & Mouse ver.x3)

Before those upgrades to the USB Hardware I was unable to survive the boxing matches at the entrance to Flotsdam after 28 tries! As soon as I used the new Hardware I was not beaten once!

system: built Febuary 2008

SM C2SBA+II Motherboard, 8 gigs DDR2 Ram
E8400 3.0 ghz Dual-Core (no overclocking)
EVGA 9500GT 1 gig DDR2 Ram (added in 2009 for gaming)
needed to tweak the settings for my 16:10 -- help from NVidea
Samsung 260HD TOC television set at 1280x1024
Vista Home Premium 64bit hacked to prevent interactivity (only 43 "processes" running including all security.) added 2009 for gaming to other OS.

NOTE: I disconnect from the internet when I play

original keyboard ps2 = US$3.00 104 keys generic
original mouse ps2 = US$1.00 800DPI (so it said) mouse generic

Game using custom settings - medium high

Would be a better investment to upgrade your graphic card though. A decent one can be bought for a reasonable price - for example, I got my GTX460 768MB for CAD$130. Plus, it's a more future-proof investment.

As Andrzej has mentioned in an earlier in this thread (not sure if you'd read it), the QTE issues occur on PCs close to or below minimum requirement. You have a 9500GT which is below the minimum requirement of 8800GT (as a reference look at this [url=http://www.hwcompare.com/4453/geforce-8800-gt-512mb-vs-geforce-9500-gt-1gb-gddr3/]comparison).

In short, I'm not saying that buying a better mouse and keyboard doesn't help, but if you are paying $70 for those, you might as well get a new graphics card instead.

p/s: I'm using a generic keyboard that I paid $5 or $10 for from a thrift store, just so you know.

This is under consideration or perhaps another new build; I generally do not play games that use much graphics and run in the other OS which is Win 2K with open source graphic assistance. I mainly play wargames such as Steel Panthers for Tactics or other old turn based Strategy games like MoM and Civ3. Elemental WoM is the only other graphic intensive game I currently own and I am going to play in the near future. One of my adult children bought me Witcher 1 EEDC which I enjoyed so much I purchased Witcher 2 which is the only reason I ever considere a RT RPG.

Excuse me for butting in.

I have the following rigs:
Intel Core 2 Duo E7500 @2.93GHz
RAM 3GB DDR2 (Virtual Memory set to 3072)
NVIDIA GeForce 9400 GT 512MB 128Bit
Monitor Samsung SyncMaster 943 18.5" with Max Res 1360x769
Windows 7 Ultimate 32 Bit SP1

Obviously these specs wouldn't be enough to bring the full glory of Witcher 2, even with SSAO and UberSampling off.

I also had the classic "Kayran QTE Hell" during my first play through. After literally 23 failed attempts and had almost given up completely, I started to lower the resolution to 1024x768 and mucked around the user.ini file to better suit my machine capabilities--not touching the configurator.exe since I know it is not as effective.

Sure enough, I got pass the Kayran episode easily.

That was in Patch 1.2. I was happy and even managed to finish TW2 6 times in a row.

And then came a long Patch 1.3. Despite the endless praises to the fact of gaining more FPS in this version, I could no longer play coherently in the usual 1024x768 since the FoV got somewhat "truncated"--for lack of a better word and I don't like that particular view. Easy enough, I play around the user.ini file again and found out that I could still get the good old widescreen view by slightly changing the Height to 720 or 740 and set the Fullscreen flag to 0.

My questions:
1. What are the ideal TextureMemoryBudget and TextureTimeBudget I have to set in regards to my VRAM (512MB)?

2. What file do I have to customize from the extracted "pack0.dzip" to maximize the customizations results in terms of balancing between graphics and performance?

Thank you in advance for any help in this regards. If this posting is considered improper for this particular thread, I will open a new one under my own name, if anyone here think it's necessary to be done so.