The witcher 3 ray tracing: The Witcher 3’s Ray Tracing is a Game Changer

The Witcher 3’s Ray Tracing is a Game Changer

By
Austin Moeller

A next-gen update for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt adds a slew of graphical improvements that make this masterpiece look like a brand-new game.

A next-gen update recently released for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, included with a Complete Edition package on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. This comes as a free upgrade for those who already own the game, but includes all official content and DLC for first-time players. While this updated version of The Witcher 3 brings gameplay tweaks and an all-new quest for fans of the Netflix adaptation, the visual upgrades are possibly the most substantial. The addition of ray tracing and other graphical improvements like 4K textures and improved shadows demonstrate a great approach to making an old game feel new again.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is one of the highest-rated and well-renowned video games of all time, so it’s all the more impressive that developer CD Projekt Red continues to find new ways to improve upon it more than seven years after release. Having originally launched for Xbox One and PS4 in 2015, the Complete Edition and its visual upgrades bring this iconic game into the modern era, including ray-traced global illumination and ray-traced ambient occlusion on console, with PC adding ray-traced reflections and shadows alongside new Ultra+ settings.

RELATED: What Cyberpunk 2077’s Phantom Liberty DLC Could ‘Steal’ From The Witcher 3

Ray tracing and high framerates have been at the forefront of discussions regarding performance and graphical fidelity in recent years, especially among more hardcore PC enthusiasts looking to obtain the best possible visuals in their games. These features have also been a major bullet point in marketing the newest generation of consoles and GPUs. Just in the last few years, several games have received ray-tracing features after release, including Metro Exodus, Doom Eternal, and Fortnite. Even less modern games like Portal and Quake have received updated versions with various ray tracing features.

The ray tracing added to console versions of The Witcher 3 (RTGI and RTAO) allow more accurate bounce lighting and shading between different surfaces, objects, and characters. This means sources of light now realistically produce shading and coloration within the environment. For example, if there is a candle in a room with a red banner, the light will now slightly color the room with a red hue. In outdoor environments, the sunlight will bounce off the sand onto nearby rocks and wagons, with appropriate ray-traced shadows and reflections on PC that dramatically enhance their quality and accuracy.

When CD Projekt Red released the notorious Cyberpunk 2077, it served as a prime example of how graphics and performance can directly affect the quality of a game. To put this into perspective, the PC version of the game has an average review score of 86 on Metacritic, while the PS4 and Xbox One versions are at 57 and 61, respectively.

This perfectly demonstrates the impact that improved graphics and performance can potentially have on the player experience. With these ray tracing additions in The Witcher 3, the various environments feel more grounded and realistic, which ultimately improve players’ immersion and make it feel like a brand-new game across already impressive environments.

All of these combined graphical changes drastically affect the visuals, and they take The Witcher 3 from being a good-looking last-gen game to a true modern title with advanced features. The Witcher 3 was already a certified masterpiece in the eyes of many, so graphical updates, gameplay changes, and new content make the Complete Edition a definitive version of the game. With talks of CD Projekt Red using Unreal Engine 5 for all future projects for The Witcher franchise, many fans are eager to see what the esteemed developer can accomplish in the future.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.

MORE: Comparing God of War Ragnarok’s Side Quests to The Witcher 3’s

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Related Topics

  • GR Originals
  • CD Projekt Red
  • The Witcher
  • The Witcher 3
  • PS5
  • Xbox Series X
  • PC
  • Switch
  • PS4
  • Xbox One

About The Author

Austin is a passionate father and gamer who loves his family, video games, technology, and cars. Sonic Adventure is his favorite video game of all time, as the feeling of speed, freedom, exploration, and discovery heightened his love for video games at a young age. He also believes virtual reality is the future of gaming technology, media consumption, and online social interaction, with some of his favorite VR games being Half-Life: Alyx and Resident Evil 4 VR.

After gaming for 25 years and working countless roles in fields that were never truly fulfilling, Austin is thrilled to pursue his dream of entering the video game industry as a content writer. With a Bachelor of Arts in Corporate Communication and extensive knowledge of video game history, culture, and technology, Austin plans to utilize his unmatched work ethic, willingness to learn, and ability to work under strict deadlines to consistently produce high quality gaming content.

The Witcher 3 next-gen update tested: worse performance, even without ray tracing

Update: CDPR have released a PC hotfix that returns non-ray traced performance to its previous levels, with RT performance getting a boost as well. Hooray! Though it’s still quite stuttery and it appears AMD FSR is causing crashes. Less hooray! The original article, based on test results taken before the hotfix, continues below:


Earlier today we brought news that The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s next-gen update – a seemingly juicy serving of new ray tracing, DLSS/FSR upscaling, and assorted quality of life features – had in fact arrived in a bit of a mess. To assess the damage, I’ve spent some time with it myself, and can confirm: it ain’t great! Besides the devastating frames-per-second toll that the RT effects take, it seems far more crash-prone than I ever remember The Witcher 3 being in the past, and performance in general is just worse than it was pre-update.


This isn’t my usual performance analysis/best settings guide routine, because in this case I kinda think it’s better to wait and see if CD Projekt Red can tame the performance problems with hotfixes and future updates, which they’ve now acknowledged they’re looking into. More on these woes below, and I also chatted to Liam about our shared inability to wrangle a good framerate out of the new settings:

Watch on YouTube

Liam’s had similar issues with The Witcher 3’s next-gen update performance.


First off, some balance. With all four of the new ray traced options enabled – that’s global illumination, reflections, shadows, and ambient occlusion – The Witcher 3 does look noticeably better. The iffy screen space reflections on bodies of water are replaced, no longer jerking across the surface depending on where you’re looking, and the improved ambient occlusion give added depth to detailed interiors.


It’s great to see FSR and DLSS involved, too. In an ideal world, these performance boosters would be in every PC game, and while DLSS looks crisper in its Balanced and Quality modes than FSR does, their joint inclusion means every GPU make is covered. For RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 owners, there’s also the option of enabling DLSS 3 with frame generation. It’s a commendably substantial update, graphics-wise.

Caption

Attribution


Sadly, even upscaling can’t save most GPUs from buckling under the weight of Wild Hunt’s ray tracing additions. I’ve mainly been testing with a high-end RTX 3070, installed alongside an Intel Core i5-11600K and 16GB of DDR4 RAM, and at 1440p, the all-in RT Ultra preset averages a mere 27fps. With DLSS on Balanced mode (and this is DLSS 2, not DLSS 3 with its interpolated bonus fames), that only rose to 34fps.


After bothering Katharine for her old benchmark spreadsheets, I found she’d previously averaged 102fps from the RTX 3070 when running the game’s Ultra preset back in 2020. 27fps therefore represents a 74% ray tracing tax, or 67% when using Balanced DLSS to make it just about playable. But it’s even worse than that, because I re-ran the Ultra preset with this next-gen update and averaged only 90fps. So the internet grumbles are true: The Witcher 3 really does run slower after this patch, even if you completely ignore its most hardware-intensive features.


Even dropping to 1080p – surely a resolution at which the RTX 3070 would usually be overkill – produced some deeply underwhelming results. The RT Ultra preset? Still only 38fps. RT Ultra with Balanced DLSS? That was 54fps, a better boost than I got at 1440p, but at the cost of more noticeably blurred visuals due to the upscaler’s render resolution dropping even lower than 1080p. And once again, the game ran worse on the standard Ultra preset than it did in 2020, an average of 115fps lagging behind the 133fps that Katharine recorded.


There’s another preset simply named RT, which keeps the RT Ultra preset’s ray traced global illumination but switches it off for reflections, shadows, and ambient occlusion. Back at 1440p, a combination of the RT preset and Balanced DLSS afforded the RTX 3070 a more reasonable 51fps. However, that still means you’re roughly halving overall performance to get the least individually noticable ray tracing effect of the bunch.

RT Ultra does look great. Just… not always in motion.


Chances are you’d have a better time with an even faster/newer/more expensive GPU, but when I tried to find out by installing the brand spanking new AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX, the game couldn’t avoid crashing long enough for me to grab a single meaningful benchmark. Yes, stability is an issue with this update as well. The Radeon RX 7900 XTX got the worst of it, conking out to desktop every single time, but the RTX 3070 also saw more than its share of crashes: random crashes, crashes when changing settings, crashes when alt-tabbing. Not good.


Obviously, such regular wonkiness needs urgent fixing on CDPR’s end. Though for me, the most egregious failure of the next-gen update is the fall in non-ray traced performance. It’s one thing to sit in an RTX 30 series tower and bemoan dropping to 90fps, but there will be Witcher 3 players out there with graphics cards like the GTX 1050 Ti or Radeon RX 570, and thus need every frame they can get. Ray traced effects were never going to be viable for lower-end systems but for them to face an FPS cut anyway is immensely disappointing.


Luckily, you can roll back The Witcher 3 to an earlier version if the next-gen update isn’t working out for you. Not as lucky as we’d be if it didn’t botch anything in the first place, but hey.

The video clearly showed how ray tracing changed the graphics in the next-gen version of The Witcher 3 on RTX 3080

There is very little time left before the release of the next-gen version of