The Witcher 3 Remastered Gets Stunning Path-Traced Graphics, GPUs Tremble

The launch of The Witcher 3: Remastered as a free cross-platform update with path tracing has generated quite a buzz. Not only is the beloved classic The Witcher 3 still receiving excellent, free updates, but with the latest graphical upgrades, it can now be as GPU intensive with path tracing enabled as the game originally was at the time of its launch.

With this latest update and path tracing enabled, the game looks a lot closer to the E3 2014 footage people loved. The addition of path tracing, however, has been somewhat controversial in some circles. Some people dislike what the more realistic lighting does to the art style of the game, but keep in mind, it can always be disabled--path and ray tracing isn't being forced on anybody.

The new bells and whistles take a heavy performance toll, though. Without relying on Frame Generation and upscaling, most users will likely be limited to lower quality in-game graphics settings with RT and PT enabled, without a GPU like the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080. That's expected with open world path tracing, but I did some impromptu testing with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti for this writeup.


Besides enabling Path Tracing, which overrides numerous ray tracing and reflections/shadow-related settings, I set all available options besides "Terrain Quality" to "Medium". I also disabled most optional post-processing effects like Bloom, but did keep NVIDIA HairWorks without AA enabled in addition to Light Shafts to supplement RT. Terrain Quality I kept Low in hopes of reducing the overall load.

The results of my testing revealed that a RTX 3060 Ti is capable of hitting 30 FPS  at 1440p, with DLSS Ultra Performance enabled. That leaves enough headroom for 2x Frame Generation with Lossless Scaling on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, paired with an Intel Core i7-10700K and 32GB of DDR4 RAM, to achieve 60 FPS.


If you have the GPU muscle to enable the new Ultra+ graphics settings with Path Tracing though, you'll be in for a version of The Witcher 3 with significantly-upgraded, next-generation visuals. From the developers working on The Witcher 4 and who gave us RT Overdrive path tracing in Cyberpunk 2077, this is to be expected.


Surprisingly, there's already a major performance mod available for the Witcher 3 Path Tracing update, appropriately titled "Path Tracing and Ray Tracing Optimization (Remastered)" by HourLines on NexusMods. Applied atop my Path Tracing Medium settings, I saw a 50% base FPS boost to 45 FPS with no apparent loss in visual quality, and got up to 100 FPS via 2X Lossless Scaling frame generation.

If you already own The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Remastered should be available to you as a free update. Comment below if you're enjoying the game with this latest update and if you have specific optimizations to share.