The Witcher 3's next-gen upgrade is absolutely stunning on PC - but even with the latest hotfix patch, performance is nowhere near as good as it should be. digitalfoundry reports:
The Witcher 3 is over seven years old now - and we were surprised and delighted to see CD Projekt RED return to the game, modernising it with a range of visual upgrades. Our take on the console versions is coming shortly, but we're kicking off with a look at the PC build, which delivers the widest range of enhancements compared to the original release.
Beyond the ultra plus settings, there are further upgrades baked into the new update. I cannot speak for all cutscenes, but I really liked seeing that the low-quality video from the game's intro has been replaced and appears to run in real-time now - looking so much better for it. Beyond that nicety, the next-gen upgrade has a number of new assets and higher res textures, while elements that were previously textures - such as the cobbles of Novigrad - are now full 3D geometry.
Ray-traced shadows do their usual job of adding distance and varying degrees of sharpness based on their distance away from the shadow-casting source, while also adding screen-space shadows for tufts of grass, giving them a shaded and shadowed look which is otherwise completely missing in the original game. I think this is a very significant difference as I always thought grass in the old game looked weirdly unshaded and two-dimensional as a result.
There are big performance problems with the game - and it's all about the DX12 render path. Even when rendering an identical scene to the DX11 version, performance is much lower. The frame-rate numbers here are all from CPU-limited scenarios on a Core i9 12900K matched with 6400MT/s DDR5.
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