The Witcher 3 PC - Next-Gen - Game-Changing Visuals But What About Performance?

Alex Battaglia presents the DF tech review for The Witcher 3's next-gen upgrade, as running on PC. Running through the entire gamut of upgrades, including the game-changing ray tracing effects, the patch modernises The Witcher 3 with top-tier RT visuals. Unfortunately, there are substantial problems with performance that cannot be overlooked - and perhaps surprisingly, it's the CPU that is taxed the most. These problems are not addressed in the hotfix patch.

[AMartor]

I think there should be advanced options for RT rather than just "ON/OFF", like we have in Marvel's Spider-Man.

[vlads]

9:50 I find it really weird that you don't mention HBAO+ at all. The grass didn't look even nearly as bad with it on and the performance cost was negligible. HBAO+ was removed with the next gen update, which is a huge shame.

[OsaculnenolajO]

I'm surprised Alex didn't mention the removal of HBAO+, which is a huge loss for those unable to run RT at playable framerates.

Also, its insane that DX12 is causing a 30% or more performance hit right off that bat. No wonder RT runs terribly, when its base FPS is already 30% lower.

[thorbjornjenssen]

Thank you so much for talking about the issues where the camera will slow down, suddenly speed up and appear stuttery even with perfect frametimes. There is also a really bad stutter that happens every time Geralt transitions from walking to jogging, super noticeable if you move the stick slowly. I think it's due to these camera issues, not Geralt's actual movement a lot of people dislike the way movement feels in this game. I was shocked that these issues weren't fixed in this update. Thankfully there is a mod that fixes it. Hoping that the devs see this video and fixes an issue that has been bugging me for about 6 years. Haha

[Glotttis]

Problem with Witcher 3's RT implementation is that everything is locked behind the super demanding RT GI option and there is no option to tweak RT quality. So there is no way to use just RT Reflections or shadows or AO. They need to decouple RT GI from the rest of RT settings. For example I can live without super demanding RT GI, but I would like to use just the RT reflections only, which are far less demanding.

[snacktics]

Showed Skellige, Emperors Palace, Novigrad, Toussaint, Kaer Morhen - Thanks for not just showing White Orchard. Saw a lot of White Orchard videos last week :P

[Reedg]

DX11 with Ultra + settings is the way to go for me. Best performance with my testing

[majinboo]

they also got rid of hbao+ which is FAR superior AO than SSAO, such a shame. i like hbao+ so much.

[Taijifufu]

That camera jitter has been driving me _crazy!_ I keep trying to figure out what's going on if there's some bottleneck or frames dropping or if the camera really is just snapping around even though the framerate is steady. Thanks for the rundown Alex. Happy Holidays!

[VelcroSnake]

Just wonder why they removed HBAO+ from the settings. It looked better than SSAO, and I can't run RT, so I'm kinda stuck with worse looking shadows than 1.32 had. I think that's why the original looks 'weirdly unshaded and two dimensional', if you're comparing it to just RT off in the updated game, it's not using HBAO+, while HBAO+ doesn't look nearly as unshaded and two dimensional in 1.32

[Energeds]

Wish you'd mentioned that they have removed HBAO+ from the game.

[konya]

Omg... I've been waiting for you guys! I think I know why it's a little late.
I hope they bring us a patch before the end of the year.(Hotfix isn't enough.)

[anonony]

I have a 3080 and 5800x 3d and had some crazy frame drops. It seemed somewhat random too, sometimes it stuttered like crazy

[thefrostbyte]

Very interesting, I learned in this video that being CPU limited doesn't always look like having 1 or 2 cores at 100% but can actually look like it did in the video. Great dive into this and I really hope for improvements... it's probably one of the best looking games ever with the new features, they just run at a pretty unplayable framerate especially when you throw the stuttering into the picture.

[bolski]

Wow. This is the most comprehensive video I've seen yet showing the differences, the awesome things and the not-so-awesome things. I myself am on an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 with a, ugh, GTX 1660. But when I first played The Witcher 3, I was on an AMD Phenom X3 720BE (I had the 4th core unlocked due to a special setting in my motherboard) with a GTX 550. LOL! 30 fps was manageable, but not completely. When I upgraded after that PC died to my current platform as I stated earlier, I was shocked at how smooth the game was and had to as myself how in the world did I play this game on that old rig?

Fast forward to today with the next gen update. I can get 60 FPS in DX12 mode most of the time, but definitely there are framerate drops in various areas, even when I go into White Orchard at the beginning of the game near the tavern. It will drop to low 50s. I haven't seen anything go below that. This is on high setting at 1920x1080 as that is the max my monitor can do at 60Hz.

I did a comparison myself between DX11 and DX12 and couldn't really see much of a visual difference. In fact, for me, FSR 2.0 makes the environment more blurry to me than using say TXAA in the DX11 version. Might be because I can only run at 1080p as that is what my monitor is capable of at 60hz as well. So that might be why FSR doesn't really improve anything for me other than possible get me a few extra FPS in DX12.

So I'll probably stick with the DX11 version. I'm just glad they give you the option to use either one without having to uninstall one to use the other (like in the Resident Evil 2/3 remakes and RE 7 where you have to go to Beta mode to get the DX11 versions).

Great video and have a safe and happy holidays and a Happy New Year!

[Mayhemz.]

Hope you guys release the usual optimised settings video soon!

[JCTiggs]

My thoughts.
- HBAO+ was removed from the game and made a huge visual difference with very little performance cost. I'm sure it was removed to make the RT AO stand out more. I'm currently using reshade with MXAO and it looks pretty much like HBAO+ although there are some weird visual issues depending on how the volumetric lighting is viewed.
- DX12 wrapper is poorly optimized and there is zero visual difference vs DX11 when RT and DLSS are off, CDPR is just spinning that as an excuse for the huge fps hit in DX12
- while we all appreciate the effort of putting this patch together, besides RT almost all of the improvements are from existing user mods. The RT is really the major thing CDPR added and it's not even implemented properly and completely unoptimized.
- hoping the performance issues in DX12 and RT can be fixed! If you don't have a GPU with frame generation I highly recommend keeping RT off and playing in DX11 for superior performance and a much smoother experience.

[Rockmans]

Now Cyberpunk 2077 runs better than The Witcher 3... What a time to be alive... 😂

[bourbongod]

I want a Performance RT mode. I love the shadows and the ambient light. When there’s dawn the shadows are orange as well. Everything is orange.

[BrandinPlaysRPGs]

11 months later and still not fixed. Like wtf.