Experts Identify Cause of The Witcher 3 Performance Problems Even an RTX 6090 Wouldn’t Fix

Digital Foundry found that path tracing in the updated The Witcher 3 puts so much load on the CPU that even an RTX 5090 can’t hold a stable 60 FPS without frame generation. A faster graphics card won’t fix that.

The Digital Foundry team found that in some locations the CPU becomes the main performance limit even at 4K. In tests with an RTX 5090 and an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D, the game runs at only 40-50 FPS at 1080p with DLSS in Performance mode.

Patch 5.01 was released for consoles to fix freezes, and it also partially improved CPU load on PC. CD Projekt Red still has work to do, though. For now, it is hard to recommend playing with path tracing on most PC configurations.

Source: iXBT.games