Digital Foundry Releases Optimized PC Settings Guide for The Witcher 3 Remaster

Path tracing is probably better left turned off.

Digital Foundry recently examined the remaster of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. CD Projekt RED delivered gameplay enhancements alongside a graphical update.

At launch, many players criticized the developer for the graphics quality. The situation improved following the release of update 5.01, which introduced a series of visual improvements, including “refined glow effects, tone compression, character lighting, ray tracing, and path tracing.” However, Digital Foundry noted that performance issues persist, with framerates occasionally dropping significantly.

Even on a PC equipped with an RTX 5090-class graphics card running at 4K with DLAA, performance drops by roughly 16% on ultra settings. When enabling ultra ray tracing and switching to DLSS Quality mode, the performance gap widens to 25%.

Digital Foundry experimented with the settings and prepared two sets of optimized configurations for playing with and without ray tracing.

Enabling path tracing reduced performance in tests by approximately 60% to 67% indoors and by 51% outdoors, prompting the recommendation to turn path tracing off alongside NVIDIA HairWorks. Ray-traced shadows are also impractical to use because problems with shadow pop-in and animation remain.

Screen-space reflections should be left at low, while shadow quality, water quality, and the level of detail can be set to high.