Recently, Digital Foundry specialists examined The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt remaster. CD Projekt RED offered not only gameplay improvements but also a graphical update.
At launch, many players criticized the developer for the quality of the graphics. After the release of update 5.01, the situation improved, as a number of graphical enhancements were introduced, including “refined glow effects, tone mapping, character lighting, ray tracing, and path tracing.” However, Digital Foundry noted that performance issues remain — sometimes it drops significantly.
Even on a PC with an RTX 5090-level graphics card, when playing in 4K using DLAA, performance drops by approximately 16% on “ultra settings,” and when “ultra-RT” (with ray tracing) is enabled and switching to DLSS in “quality” mode, the performance gap increases to 25%.
Digital Foundry experimented with settings and prepared two versions of “optimized settings” for playing with and without ray tracing.
Enabling path tracing reduced performance in tests by approximately 60–67% indoors and 51% in open spaces, so it is recommended to turn off “path tracing,” as well as NVIDIA HairWorks. RT shadows are also “impractical” to use, as there are still issues with shadow pop-in and animation.
Screen-Space Reflections are recommended to be set to “low”; while shadow quality, water quality, and detail level should be set to “high.”
Digital Foundry hopes that CD Projekt RED will continue to allocate resources to refine The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt remaster.