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As CD Projekt RED rolled out the hotfix that improved the performance of The Witcher 3 on PC, Digital Foundry looked at the new version of the open-world action GDR to test first-hand the technical change the title has undergone.
Digital Foundry said it was impressed by the graphical leap made by The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt with the next-gen update, due first and foremost to the introduction of Ray Tracing but also to that other welcome new features.
The good and bad
In the original game, almost all of the lighting with bounce effects for reflective and opaque surfaces is handled by cubemaps placed around the world by CD Projekt artists, which results in an overall dull, bluish appearance of the lighting. With the addition of RTXIGI and RTAO, we get a dramatic change, dramatically increasing the sense of realism.
Reflections with ray tracing greatly improve the rendering of water surfaces, whether bays on the sea, tiny puddles on the ground, or even small fountains (only one exception was noted in the sea at Skellige, which was plagued by technical problems). Finally, ray tracing shadows increase the distance and various degrees of sharpness based on their position from the shadow projection source, adding a graphical complexity absent in the previous version of the game.
Added to this are the Ultra+ settings, including those concerning the density of NPCs, textures, shadows, and so on. Two of these impressed Digital Foundry the most: vegetation density and long-distance detail level, to the point that the Ultra presets "look almost ridiculous" in comparison.
All good, in short? Unfortunately not, since The Witcher 3 Complete Edition suffers from severe performance problems on PC. According to the analysis, the game is overly CPU-dependent, more so than in titles such as Flight Simulator and Marvel's Spider-Man Miles Morales. It also appears that DirectX 12 is not being adequately exploited by the game (originally released with DirectX 11).
In case you missed it: You can now visit Norway's newest reserve in Call of the Wild: The Angler as a free DLC.
The only way to overcome CPU limitations is to take advantage of NVIDIA's DLSS 3, which keeps the frame rate high with less erratic average frame times and almost no latency penalty. The analysis also revealed instances of stuttering with shader compilation and a strange stuttering phenomenon concerning camera shifting.
Will you try out these settings? Let us know in the comments!
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