The Witcher 3 Remastered comes out tomorrow with an entire host of enhancements that but once more carry it into the present era. But it surely looks as if if you wish to max the sport out with path tracing, you are going to want an absolute beast of a gaming PC.
CD Projekt Purple up to date The Witcher 3 system necessities forward of tomorrow’s replace, and whereas it’s nonetheless cheap on the low finish, if you wish to allow path tracing at 4K, you are going to want an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080, which goes for about $1,650 on the low finish proper now. Even with that beefy graphics card, the system necessities counsel that you’re going to want each DLSS upscaling and body era to hit 60 fps, which implies Nvidia’s penultimate GPU nonetheless struggles with the 11-year-old recreation.
So, I in fact plugged in an RTX 5080 to see how the sport runs with path tracing in a lap round Novigrad, and it is not nice. At 4K with the whole lot enabled, together with path tracing and hairworks, with DLSS upscaling set to ‘Efficiency,’ the Nvidia 5080 will get a mean of 30 fps. That goes as much as 59 fps with body era, however at that low of a base body fee, there are some very noticeable artifacts, notably within the floor textures.
To be truthful, hairworks has been nuking body charges in The Witcher 3 because it first launched again within the day. You may (and possibly ought to) disable hairworks to get significantly better efficiency, however even then, the 5080 cannot hit 60 fps with out body gen. With hairworks disabled and path tracing enabled at 4K with DLSS set to efficiency, the sport manages a 44 fps common, which jumps to 80 fps when body era is enabled.
One of the best ways to get good efficiency out of The Witcher 3 Remastered proper now, in need of shopping for an RTX 5090, is to disable path tracing solely. While you try this on the RTX 5080, the body fee jumps to 55 fps, which is extra cheap, particularly contemplating that each one of this testing was finished in Novigrad, which has been infamous for efficiency points since 2015. Take into account that even with path tracing disabled, there are a ton of different ray tracing results that you could disable to additional enhance your efficiency.
Fortunately, the brand new system necessities counsel that the sport will scale down properly to decrease {hardware}. It’s going to simply be a query of which settings you might be keen to disable to get good efficiency from this large recreation. Nonetheless, it does sting to play an 11-year-old recreation with some of the costly graphics playing cards available on the market and never have the ability to max the whole lot out at an excellent body fee.
We have got lots extra on The Witcher 3 Remastered, together with a roundup of all the improvements, and the global release times. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered is obtainable as a free replace on PC, PS5, Xbox Sequence X|S, and Nintendo Swap 2 from September 29. To ease you into Geralt’s life on the highway, try the things The Witcher 3 doesn’t tell you, plus IGN’s The Witcher 3 walkthrough and The Witcher 3 endings information, which outlines all the main quests and decisions within the base recreation and expansions (now bundled in with the Remastered version). While you’re prepared for the robust decisions, try our The Witcher 3 sex and romance information to see who Geralt can smooch and all of the alternatives to take action. And to make Geralt as sturdy a monster hunter as doable, try all of the Witcher gear locations, Places of Power locations, and even Gwent card locations.
Jacqueline Thomas
Senior Tech Editor
Jackie Thomas is the Senior Tech Editor at IGN and the PC parts queen. She’s been masking gaming {hardware} for greater than a decade for IGN, TechRadar, Gizmodo, PC Gamer and extra. You may comply with her @Jackiecobra