The Witcher 3 certainly looks great after the next-gen update but players report that performance is a bit of a mess, even on powerful GPUs like 3080ti.
After a long wait, The Witcher 3 next-gen update has finally arrived on PC, Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 , offering a wide variety of graphical improvements and features such as ray-tracing, better foliage, draw distance and more.
On PC, the game even comes with the Ultra+ preset, which boosts the level of detail to the max, making the PC version by far the best-looking one. Sadly, that comes at a massive cost, since The Witcher 3 next-gen update runs poorly even on capable hardware.
Players with cards like Nvidia RTX 3080ti and 4090 report stuttering, massive frame-rate drops and crashing. "Even with a 4090 and 24 gigs of VRAM it's feeling very stuttery," ResetEra user The Dark Shape wrote.
Others added that they've got a massive FPS drop even when using the same settings as before the update was installed. "I'm getting 40-50fps on the regular ultra preset (no RT) on DLSS quality at 5120x1440 when I was getting 110+ fps on Ultra in the regular version a few days ago," ResetEra user Flandy reports.
Of course, we had to test the update for ourselves to see what kind of performance hit we'll get with ray-tracing and the new Ultra+ preset and things are not ideal, to say the least. With Ryzen 3600 and Radeon RX 6800, at 1440p resolution, the game is unplayable (15-20 FPS) with ray-tracing turned on. Things got a bit better when we turned off ray tracing (around 50-60 FPS) but the stuttering was simply unbearable.
Before the actual update, we reinstalled The Witcher 3 and deleted all mods and custom user settings to make sure none of that conflicts with the patch. But despite this, the performance still feels disappointing.
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It's a darn shame that game launches like these are becoming somewhat of a tradition for CD Projekt Red . The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt wasn't perfect at launch and you probably know the whole Cyberpunk 2077 controversy.
CD Projekt RED have recently announced they are switching to Unreal Engine 5 for their future games, so it's highly likely that the performance issues and bugs found in their games are due to the in-house Red Engine.
Hopefully, The Witcher 1 Remake, the next major Witcher game and Cyberpunk 2077 sequel won't suffer the same fate as their predecessors.
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The Witcher 3 next-gen mods compatibility - List of both working and non-working mods
