The Witcher 3 Remastered comes out tomorrow with a whole host of improvements that yet again bring it into the current generation. But it seems like if you want to max the game out with path tracing, you’re going to need an absolute beast of a gaming PC.
CD Projekt Red updated The Witcher 3 system requirements ahead of tomorrow’s update, and while it is still reasonable on the low-end, if you want to enable path tracing at 4K, you’re going to need an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080, which is going for about $1,650 on the low-end right now. But even with that beefy graphics card, the system requirements suggest that you’ll need both DLSS upscaling and frame generation to hit 60 fps, which means Nvidia’s penultimate GPU still struggles with the 11-year-old game.
So, I of course plugged in an RTX 5080 to see how the game runs with path tracing in a lap around Novigrad, and it isn’t great. At 4K with everything enabled, including path tracing and hair works, with DLSS upscaling set to ‘Performance,’ the Nvidia 5080 gets an average of 30 fps. That goes up to 59 fps with frame generation, but at that low of a base frame rate, there are some very noticeable artifacts, particularly in the ground textures.
To be fair, hairworks has been nuking frame rates in The Witcher 3 since it first launched back in the day. You can (and probably should) disable hairworks to get much better performance, but even then, the 5080 can’t hit 60 fps without frame gen. With hairworks disabled and path tracing enabled at 4K with DLSS set to performance, the game manages a 44 fps average, which jumps to 80 fps when frame generation is enabled.
The best way to get good performance out of The Witcher 3 Remastered right now, short of buying an RTX 5090, is to disable path tracing entirely. When you do that on the RTX 5080, the frame rate jumps to 55 fps, which is more reasonable, especially considering that all of this testing was done in Novigrad, which has been notorious for performance issues since 2015. Keep in mind that even with path tracing disabled, there are a ton of other ray tracing effects that you can disable to further improve your performance.
Luckily, the new system requirements suggest that the game will scale down well to lower hardware. It’ll just be a question of which settings you are willing to disable to get good performance from this massive game. Still, it does sting to play an 11-year-old game with one of the most expensive graphics cards on the market and not be able to max everything out at a good frame rate.
We’ve got plenty more on The Witcher 3 Remastered, including a roundup of all the improvements, and the global release times. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered is available as a free update on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2 from September 29. To ease you into Geralt’s life on the road, check out the Things the Witcher 3 Doesn’t Tell You, plus IGN’s The Witcher 3 Walkthrough and The Witcher 3 Endings guide, which outlines all of the major quests and choices in the base game and expansions (now bundled in with the Remastered edition). When you’re ready for the tough choices, check out our The Witcher 3 Sex and Romance guide to see who Geralt can smooch and all the opportunities to do so. And to make Geralt as strong a monster hunter as possible, check out all 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 components queen. She’s been covering gaming hardware for more than a decade for IGN, TechRadar, Gizmodo, PC Gamer and more. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
