CD Projekt Red Scrambles To Fix PC Performance Issues In Witcher 3's Next-Gen Update
CD Projekt Red released its next-gen update for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt earlier this week, with players on PC being treated to an exclusive Ultra+ graphics setting. Unfortunately, some PC players are also experiencing a range of quirky performance issues after the update, even on systems equipped with high-end graphics cards that should have no problem running the game.
Since The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt released nearly eight years ago, the collective user reviews on Steam have been "Overwhelmingly Positive" out of the more than 545,000 gamer impressions. It's a beloved open-world RPG (or action-adventure, if you prefer), but a look at the most recent user reviews highlights an unusual number of complaints.
One user said the game is "literally unplayable" after the update went live, while another user said "all it does now is crash." Other complaints include flickering shadows, poor textures, broken ray tracing, blurry visuals, and frame rate drops, to name a few.
The good news is, developer CD Projekt Red is looking into the complaints.
"We are aware of the issues PC players have been reporting since last night's release of the update. We are actively investigating all of the reports and will be providing an update on particular issues as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience!," CD Projekt Red stated on Twitter.
That tweet went out yesterday morning. As of this writing (24 hours later), there is no further update on the matter, but one could obviously come at any time. The hope is that a cure-all patch will be released, assuming there's a singular root cause (or series of bugs that can easily be squashed).
It should be noted that there are also plenty of positive reviews on Steam since the update went live. Being a free update, you might as well give it a spin, if you've been waiting for the next-gen refresh. Just be sure to update your graphics driver first.
The Ultra+ setting on PC "significantly increases the visual fidelity of the game," according to CD Projekt Red's patch notes. It impacts the number of background characters, shadow quality, grass density, texture quality, foliage visibility range, terrain quality, water quality, and overall detail level. Users can also enable DLSS 3 (GeForce RTX 40 series) and FSR 2.1 (Radeon), regardless of whether also using the Ultra+ setting. And for both supported PC and consoles, the next-gen updates brings real-time ray tracing to the table.
