At this point, I cannot finish the damn game. The cutscenes became so laggy that they just skip to the end right after they start. But for the final dragon battle this is a disaster because I cannot make the necessary mouse-clicks to progress!
I've made changes to depth of field options, v-sync, motion blur and just about every other option turning on or off and restarting game. And the best I get is it being so choppy at the beginning of the scene, it just keeps stuttering and looping over and over and not going forward.

(I'm at the very final scene where you jump from the tower onto the dragon's back)

All this started after updating to 1.3 of course. Never had a single hiccup with the cutscenes before.

Help?

(Running: Win7 Home -- 64bit-- 8GB RAM--ATI Radeon HD 4850 1GB)

Not sure if it'll make a difference, but you might try lowering the monitor and game resolution to something ridiculously small to see if that makes a difference. Aside from ubersampling, game resolution seems to have the biggest impact on performance.

Of course, if you're using the retail or GOG versions, the simple workaround would be to uninstall (keeping the saves intact), and patch back to 1.2. I'm assuming that the Steam version doesn't allow you to do this, not that I would know.

It's strange that this would only appear in 1.3, though it seems that ATI cards took a small performance hit after the patch.

Well, lowering the resolution is one that I didn't try yet. Damn shame that it has THIS bad of a bug that the cutscenes are ruined (luckily I am at the stage where I have seen most already). Got me so pissed off that when I got to Sila being stuck with a bad crystal, I just let her implode. :>)

And yeah, I've got the GOG version too.

Ok, I've reduced the frame rate from 1440*900 to 1024*768 and no difference.

Am I the only one having this issue? I've had to chance settings and restart the game 20 times already with no improvement!

And as I already had issues with the save games before causing me to uninstall and re-install once already--I'm not too thrilled to need doing that again. aaghh.

Did you ask tech support: tw2support@cdprojektred.com?

Found this on thewitcher.com website FAQ page (http://en.thewitcher.com/support/#q22):
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Graphical issues in cutscenes or dialogues up
For Nvidia graphic card users
Please install drivers 275.33 or newer.

As for ATI graphic card users
Please install Catalyst 11.5b (or newer) drivers hotfix and latest Catalyst Application Profiles from here.

NOTE: It is advised to uninstall previous version of Catalyst Application Profiles before installing new version.

If problem still persists please turn off "Depth of field" and "Blur" option in graphic settings.
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So far it worked to get me through the final dragon battle. It seemed to turn off the interactive parts of it and just let it play through (no more useless mouse button mashing at certain points).

Boom!!! You're immortalized. Frame rate!!! LOL

I use ATI 4670 and playing with Texture Downscaling set at Low. I starting having a lot of problems with stuttering during cutscenes and general overall performance after changing Texture Downscaling to High in an attempt to improve performance after Patch 1.3 made perfomance worse.

However, today I changed it back to Low and the game runs much more smoothly and the cutscenes don't stutter like that anymore. Plus, the game looks much with Texture Downscaling at Low instead of High.