Here’s the full scoop on The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered on PC.
The Witcher 3 has returned in unexpectedly glorious style, with the venerable RPG getting a free Remastered release that brings cutting-edge RedEngine features back to the game that debuted more than 10 years ago – a final hurrah for CDPR’s bespoke tech. With a new expansion to launch next year and an Unreal-powered sequel in 2028, does the Remastered update bring the game up to modern standards on PC?
The remaster takes a good stab at it, with a reworked renderer, revised ray tracing capabilities, path tracing support and numerous visual and performance enhancements that build upon the previous big overhaul of the game, 2022’s next-gen update. These changes alter how the game looks and runs, sometimes profoundly, so they’re well worth examining – alongside the optimised settings we recommend and the few lingering issues that ought to be improved in future patches.
Let’s start with exactly what has changed. Comparing the remaster directly to the older build reveals that CD Projekt has reworked multiple elements of the renderer, including the shading model, image-based lighting and material treatments. That means that even the game’s rasterised look can be noticeably different, while the RT mode is extended with path tracing support.
One of the first things you may notice when comparing the Complete Edition against the remaster’s earlier 5.00c build is how much more washed out the new version can appear, with noticeably weaker contrast. However, patch 5.01 arrived just before publication, bringing adjustments to bloom and tone mapping that noticeably improve the presentation, with stronger contrast and greater depth in darker areas. Compared to the Complete Edition’s 4.04 build, the difference is now more nuanced. The older version retains a punchier, more contrast-heavy look, but some darker areas can appear almost crushed, losing definition in the process, while the remaster now offers a more balanced tonal presentation
Have you played The Witcher 3? (173 votes)
Yes, and I’m playing or going to play Remastered86%No, but I’m going to play Remastered12%No, and I’m not interested in Remastered3%
The downside of the comprehensive rendering update is that performance drops, sometimes considerably. At 4K resolution using DLAA on an RTX 5090, performance drops around 16 percent at ultra, while enabling ultra RT and moving to DLSS quality widens the performance gap to 25 percent.
HairWorks previously incurred an unreasonably large frame-rate penalty, but this has now been fixed – we saw around a six percent performance drop for fancier locks. However, the longstanding shading issue that makes Geralt’s white hair appear unnaturally dark in shadowed areas remains, so we’ll leave it off in our optimised settings. Beyond that, screen-space reflections is one of the heaviest raster settings in the game, with low providing around a 50 percent performance improvement over high depending on the scene, so low is the preferred setting.
Additional raster settings offer further opportunities for optimisation without heavily impacting the overall presentation. High settings serve as the sweet spot for foliage visibility range, ambient occlusion – which transitions to ground truth ambient occlusion – and shadow quality, providing most of the visual benefits without excessive performance hits. Settings like screen-space shadows and water quality also prove efficient enough to leave enabled on higher presets. For weaker CPUs, number of background characters can be dropped to high to improve performance by around six percent in populated areas like Novigrad.
Optimised Settings
RT Optimised Settings
Ray Tracing
Off
Ray Tracing
On
NVIDIA HairWorks
Off
Path Tracing
Off
Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion
GTAO
Ray Traced Global Illumination
Performance
GTAO
High
Ray Traced Reflections
Optional*
Screen-Space Reflections
Low
Ray Traced Shadows
Off
Number of Background Characters
High
Ray Traced Ambient Occlusion
On
Shadow Quality
High
*Enable RT Reflections where GPU headroom allows
Screen-Space Shadows
On
Terrain Quality
High
Water Quality
High
Foliage Visibility Range
High
Grass Density
Medium or High
Texture Quality
High (8GB VRAM)
Detail Level
High
Ray tracing introduces some of the most dramatic visual improvements, most notably through path tracing and ray-traced global illumination, which integrate indirect lighting more convincingly into interiors and shaded areas. However, these features demand immense GPU and CPU resources, particularly in CPU-heavy stress points like Novigrad’s Hierarch Square. Enabling path tracing dropped performance by around 60 to 67 percent indoors, while outdoors the drop was closer to 51 percent. Ray-traced shadows, meanwhile, impose substantial additional CPU overhead while retaining visible shadow pop-in and animation issues, making them difficult to recommend even on high-end systems
You can see our optimised settings above, with rasterised and RT versions in the left and right columns respectively. On the RTX 4060, the rasterised optimised settings produce an 85 percent frame-rate lift versus ultra+ or 64 percent versus ultra, while keeping most options on high. For the RT setup on the RX 9070 XT and a 5700X3D, frame-rates almost everywhere apart from the Hierarch Square in Novigrad are around 70fps; in this hotspot, frame-rates do dip under 60 due to the increased CPU load.
Input latency testing demonstrates that enabling v-sync without low-latency solutions results in sluggish and heavy controls – we saw input latency of around 175ms! Fortunately, Nvidia Reflex and AMD Anti-Lag 2 successfully improve latency to responsive levels, normally under 50ms.
Ultimately, The Witcher 3 Remastered delivers meaningful technical advancements, particularly through its reworked lighting, though it remains a heavier and more demanding package than its predecessor. While raster settings can be optimised effectively for mainstream hardware, the heavy CPU toll associated with certain ray tracing features indicates that the remaster still requires additional polish. Patch 5.01 has already delivered some welcome improvements to the remaster’s visual presentation, although further refinement is still needed. Hopefully CDPR continue to dedicate the resources for further tuning, as it’s worthwhile to establish a truly definitive edition of this classic RPG – even if we’re getting it for free.
Will is website editor for Digital Foundry, specialising in PC hardware, sim racing and display technology.