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The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered is the definitive version of one of the greatest games of all time. If you haven't played this masterpiece yet, this is the perfect opportunity to jump in.
In case you've been living under a rock, you probably know that The Witcher 3 already had a glow-up with the release of the Complete Edition, which brought ray-tracing to the game, along with a slate of other visual improvements, including better textures and level of detail, courtesy of the mods that CD Projekt ended up using for this release.
The remastered version also follows a similar path. There are a bunch of community-made mods here, presumably polished for the official release; there are gameplay changes, there's a new meditation screen now, allowing you to watch Geralt meditating and time passing in real time, and there's path tracing, a new lighting technique that basically includes a whole slate of ray tracing options, including ray-traced reflections, lighting, global illumination and shadows.
It's a taxing feature, but one that makes games feel more grounded and realistic, bringing breathtaking visuals and helping even older titles look spectacular in the process. The Witcher 3 was already a stunning game with the standard ray tracing, but path tracing really takes it to another level, both in terms of visuals and performance impact.
Before I go in and start talking about these things, a note that I've played this on an RTX 4080, Ryzen 7800X3D and 32 GB of RAM. I used the latest Nvidia driver; my RAM is on an XMP profile, and Resizable BAR is turned ON. Basically, all those things that help your PC give the maximum possible performance are there.
As for the settings, I played at 4K resolution, Ultra+ settings, with DLSS set to Balanced and Frame Generation ON. I turned off the game's ugly post-processing effects like vignetting, blur, light shafts and other nonsense to get the cleanest possible image.
Path Tracing ON vs OFF
Right from the get-go, my PC struggled to maintain a steady 60 FPS with the settings I've listed above. Simply put, The Witcher 3 with path tracing is a demanding beast.
Make no mistake: if you have the hardware, a 4090 or 5090, go ahead and turn on path tracing. You'll get the best possible visuals and a cinematic experience as CD Projekt Red intended. The game will look gorgeous; even the noise that usually comes with path tracing is minimal here. Ray reconstruction does a wonderful job. But don't let me tell you, here are some screenshots on the highest possible settings:
The Witcher 3 Remastered - 4K, Ultra+, Path tracing
As for the performance, it's far from ideal, but such is the nature of path tracing. I don't think we have a single game with path tracing that is able to run without upscaling and frame generation. The tech is still too demanding, even if you cough up $5000 on a GPU.
To be clear, I was not able to have a consistent 60 FPS with path tracing turned ON, even with DLSS set to Performance. The FPS drop is noticeable immediately; I've also noticed a lot of traversal stuttering when going from one location to another, when leaving interiors and heading outside - it's far from perfect.
My GPU really struggled in combat, to the point that I was regularly dying because of it.
Depending on the location, this is the performance I was getting:
- No ray tracing: 120 FPS
- Ray tracing: 77 FPS
- Path tracing: 55 FPS
And here are some comparison screenshots between ray tracing and path tracing. I've also included two screenshots with no ray tracing option activated. I think it will give you a pretty good picture of where the game is in terms of visuals right now:
The Witcher 3 Remastered - Path Tracing comparison
I really have to emphasise here that the path-traced version of The Witcher 3, along with all the improved textures, level of detail and other visual improvements, really looks really close, even better than the original E3 announcement visuals. Remember that infamous trailer before the obvious downgrade? Well, I think we're there now. It just goes to show how dedicated CD Projekt Red are to bringing improvements to their players years after release.
This version of The Witcher 3 will certainly attract a bunch of new players and give the game new life, making it stay relevant in the modern gaming era with all these fancy new additions. It's a shame that the performance isn't better. It's a bit hilarious, to be honest - The original Witcher 3 release was also problematic on PC; then we got the ray-traced version, which also brought the FPS to its knees, and now the path-tracing release is here to complete the circle.
Again, despite the performance issues, I'm over the moon that we got this version of The Witcher 3. This masterpiece deserves it.
