Even RTX 6090 won't save The Witcher 3: experts found the reason for poor performance

Digital Foundry showed that in some locations the game is CPU-bound even in 4K.

Path tracing in the updated version of The Witcher 3 loads the processor so heavily that even an RTX 5090 does not provide stable 60 FPS without frame generation, and a more powerful graphics card will not fix the situation.

Digital Foundry experts found that in some locations the processor becomes the main performance bottleneck even at 4K resolution. In tests with an RTX 5090 and AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D, the game delivers only 40–50 FPS even at 1080p with DLSS in Performance mode.

Patch 5.01, released for consoles to fix freezes, partially improved CPU utilization on PC as well. However, CD Projekt Red still has work to do. It is currently difficult to recommend playing with path tracing on most PC configurations.