Even 9 years after its release, The Witcher 3 remains one of the finest RPGs ever. Its detailed world and ingenious quest design have yet to be surpassed by another in the genre. The next-gen update released in late 2022 was a significant visual overhaul, adding ray-traced lighting, upscaling, and frame generation to an already pretty world. Let’s see how the game performs on modern hardware with all its graphics settings, including ray-tracing cranked up to ultra.
Windows/System Settings to Optimize
- Enable Resizable BAR.
- Turn on Game Mode.
- Enable Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling (HAGS) and Windowed Optimizations.
- Use the Windows “High Performance” power profile and set your GPU power management mode to the same.
- Disable Memory Integrity. Windows Menu->VBS->Device Security.
- Ensure you use the proper XMP/EXPO memory profile (if available).
- Overclock your GPU if you’re narrowly missing the 60 FPS mark.
- Here’s a guide with more detailed instructions.
The Witcher 3 Next Gen + Ray Tracing System Requirements
Min
- DirectX: DX11.
- Ray Tracing: Off.
- Resolution: 1080p.
- OS: Windows 7|Windows 8.1 (64-bit).
- CPU: Intel Core i5-2500K|AMD A10-5800K.
- GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660|AMD Radeon HD 7870.
- Memory: 6 GB.
- Storage: 50 GB.
Rec
- DirectX: DX11.
- Ray Tracing: Off.
- Resolution: 1080p.
- OS: Windows 7|Windows 8.1 (64-bit).
- CPU: Intel Core i7-3770|AMD FX-8350.
- GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770|AMD Radeon R9 290.
- Memory: 6 GB.
- Storage: 50 GB.
High
- DirectX: DX12.
- Ray Tracing: Off.
- Resolution: 1080p.
- OS: Windows 10/11 (64-bit).
- CPU: Intel Core i5-7400|Ryzen 5 1600.
- GPU: NVIDIA GTX 970|Radeon RX 480.
- Memory: 8 GB.
- Storage: 50 GB.
RT
- DirectX: DX12.
- Ray Tracing: RTAO|RTGI.
- Resolution: 1440p (with DLSS|FSR).
- OS: Windows 10/11 (64-bit).
- CPU: Intel Core i7-8700K|Ryzen 5 3600.
- GPU: NVIDIA RTX 3070|Radeon RX 6700 XT.
- Memory: 16 GB.
- Storage: 50 GB.
RT Ultra
- DirectX: DX12.
- Ray Tracing: RT Ultra.
- Resolution: 4K (with DLSS|FSR)
- OS: Windows 10/11 (64-bit).
- CPU: Intel Core i9-9700K|Ryzen 7 3700X.
- GPU: NVIDIA RTX 3080| Radeon RX 6800 XT.
- Memory: 16 GB.
- Storage: 50 GB.
Resolution & Graphics Presets
The Witcher 3 scales remarkably well across resolutions, averaging 60 FPS at 4K, 104 FPS at 1440p, and 136 FPS at 1080p at the “RT Ultra” preset. An increase of 2.25x from FHD to UHD is nothing to scoff at. We observed similar scaling with and without ray-tracing.
Test Setup
- CPU: Intel Core i9-12900K @ 5.3 GHz.
- Cooler: Arctic Liquid Freezer III 420.
- GPU: NVIDIA RTX 4090 FE.
- Motherboard: MSI PRO Z790-P WIFI.
- Memory: 16 GB x2 @ 6000 MT/s CL30.
The Witcher 3 scales admirably with the graphics settings as well. From 82 FPS at 4K “Ultra+,” we recorded framerates of 92 FPS, 105 FPS, 118 FPS, and 131 FPS at the “Ultra,” “High,” “Medium,” and “Low” quality presets, respectively. These numbers were recorded with DLSS upscaling set to quality mode.
Ray Tracing: Shadows, Reflections & GI
The Witcher 3 added ray-tracing with its “Next-Gen” update (v4), released in late 2022. The RT options include Ray Traced Global Illumination (RTGI), Ray Traced Ambient Occlusion, Ray Traced Shadows, and Ray Traced Reflections. Unfortunately, there aren’t any quality options for these, except RTGI and even that doesn’t affect performance much.
- RTGI is the most taxing and can be switched between “Quality” and “Performance” mode. The two look and perform almost the same.
- Ray Traced Reflections are the second most intensive, granting a 9% FPS boost when disabled.
- Ray Traced Shadows reduce framerates by 5-6%.
- RTAO is the most performant, with only a 4% impact on the average FPS.
Disabling ray-tracing grants a massive 60% performance boost at 4K, increasing the average FPS from 51 to 81. Luckily (for NVIDIA users), frame generation saves the day.
Ray-tracing may be taxing, but it drastically enhances the game’s visual fidelity, making it look like a recent release. And these changes aren’t subtle or incremental. They completely overhaul the look and feel of The Witcher 3:
- RTGI is the most prominent, completely changing the game’s tone and lighting.
- Indoors are darker with more accurate light penetration.
- Outdoors are shaded per the tone of natural sunlight, lighting visible objects with darker palettes for occluded ones.
- Ray Traced Shadows render contact hardening shadows, producing highly detailed vegetation shadows.
- They also produce accurate ambient shadows in low lighting, usually missed by rasterized shadow maps.
- Ray Traced Ambient Occlusion renders detailed self-contained shadows along the edges and boundaries of objects, crevices, holes, etc.
- It’s mainly evident indoors.
- Ray Traced Reflections are cast on Geralt’s armor, swords, windows, and other glassy/metallic objects in the scene.
- They have a relatively less pronounced impact on the visuals.
Ambient Occlusion & Reflections
Disabling ray tracing leaves you with SSAO or HBAO+. We recommend dropping to the former if you’re running low on performance, as disabling drastically reduces the in-game realism. HBAO+ is 2-3% slower than SSAO, and is recommended for most midrange and high-end PCs.
Screen Space Reflections can’t be disabled but only lowered in quality. Switching to “Low” can improve framerates by 25-30%, with the largest gains observed near water bodies.
NVIDIA Hairworks
NVIDIA Hairworks was quite controvertial back in the day. It crippled AMD Radeon GPUs much more than corresponding GeForce cards. Luckily, with today’s hardware, it’s a non-issue. Hairworks reduces performance by 4-8% at 4K at the highest quality settings. We suggest leaving it enabled, at least on NVIDIA GPUs.
NVIDIA Hairworks leverages DirectX 11-based tessellation to add hair strands to various characters and monsters. It produces individual hair strands of up to 115K for Geralt’s hair and 6K for his beard. For monsters, that number scales from 10K to 60K, going as high as 125K at close range.
The hair strands are PhysX-enabled and react to movement and external forces. The use of hair strands and layers allows for dynamic lighting to be applied to each for detailed shadows and self-shadows. Geralt’s hair also gets visibly wet when coming in contact with water and dries up to its normal state with time.
Number of Background Characters
This setting sets number of NPCs simultaneously rendered in ab scene. Cranking it up to “Ultra+” reduces the average framerate by 4-5%. Yet, the visual impact is minimal, and hard to observe even in the densest crowds.
Shadows & Terrain Quality
Shadow Quality sets the LOD, count, and resolution of cascaded shadow maps. The medium quality option is nearly 10% faster than the highest. The high quality offers a good balance between quality and performance.
Terrain Quality usually improves terrain detail using tessellation. However, in this case, it seems to do absolutely nothing.
Foliage Visibility Range & Grass Density
Foliage Visibility Range sets the draw distance of trees, shrubs, and grass. It impacts the quality of shadows cast by vegetation. Increasing it raises the maximum number of trees rendered in-game, along with bushes and grass. Reducing it culls distant tree shadows, followed by tree detail and entire chunks of far-off vegetation.
Grass Density sets the density of grass patches. This setting can reduce the game’s performance by up to 12%. Fortunately, anything above the medium quality option is passable, though most users should easily be able to run the ultra or ultra+ option.
Detail Level & Water Quality
Detail Level sets the LOD of decals, including blood splatter, dead bodies, and other special effects generated dynamically during combat encounters. It doesn’t notably impact performance and hence can be set as per your preference.
Water Quality doesn’t affect the visual fidelity of water or water bodies. Instead, it sets the size of waves and ripples produced while boating or swimming. It causes the boat to thrust up and down and create ripples when passing through water bodies. Reducing it below the high-quality option disables water simulation. Fortunately, the performance impact of water quality is trivial.
Upscaling & Frame Generation
The Witcher 3 features DLSS 3, FSR 2, and XeSS upscaling technologies. Frame generation is available for RTX 40 series users, which is critical for attaining playable framerates at higher resolutions with ray tracing.
Merely enabling upscaling grants a 55% performance boost at 4K, with frame generation boosting framerates by another 50%. This pushes the RTX 4090 from 33 FPS at native 4K “RT Ultra” to 51 FPS and 76 FPS with upscaling and frame generation, respectively. Be sure to install the FSR 3 FG mod on RTX 30 series GPUs as explained in our low-end guide.
NVIDIA RTX users are advised to download the latest version of the dll files for the upscaler and frame generation. You merely need to extract the archive and copy (replace) them to the x64_dx12 folder found in the bin folder of the main game directory. This will reduce or eliminate any flickering or artifacts caused by frame generation.
The Witcher 3: VRAM Usage
The Witcher 3 uses a modest amount of VRAM, even with ray tracing at 4K. We recorded a maximum graphics memory consumption of 12 GB at 4K RT Ultra and 11 GB at 4K Ultra. QHD or 1440p uses slightly less than 9 GB with ray tracing and 8 GB without. FHD or 1080p tops out at ~8 GB with ray-tracing and 7 GB without.
The Witcher 3: CPU Bottlenecks
With ray-tracing enabled, The Witcher 3 is predominantly GPU-bound. However, at the Ultra+ preset, the game can get fairly CPU-bound, with GPU-Busy deviations of 20-30%, even at 4K. We believe this is due to the less-than-optimal port to DirectX 12.
The Witcher 3 Performance Summary
- Ray Tracing: It goes without saying, but ray-tracing has the most impact on the game’s performance, reducing the average framerate by up to ~40% at 4K.
- Screen Space Reflections: SSR is the second most taxing setting, granting an FPS boost of 25-30% when reduced to a lower quality.
- Grass & Foliage: Grass density and foliage visibility also have a marked impact on performance, improving the average FPS by 10-15% when reduced in visual fidelity.
- Shadows: Reducing shadow quality can uplift your framerates by nearly 10% on average.
The Witcher 3 Next Gen Update: Optimized Settings + Ray Tracing
Post-processing settings, including vignette, motion blur, depth of field, light shafts, chromatic aberration, and bloom negligibly impact performance and are left to personal preference.
| Graphics Settings | High-end | Midrange | Low-end |
|---|---|---|---|
| Resolution | 4K (3840×2160) | 1440p (2560×1440) | 1080p (1920×1080) |
| FPS Target | 75 FPS | 60 FPS | 60 FPS |
| Frame Gen | On | On | On |
| Ray Tracing | On | On | On |
| RTGI | Quality | Quality | Performance |
| RT Reflections | On | On | Off |
| RT Shadows | On | On | Off |
| RT Ambient Occlusion | On | On | Off |
| Anti-Aliasing | FSR/DLSS Balanced | FSR/DLSS Balanced | FSR/DLSS Balanced |
| NVIDIA Hairworks | On | On | Off |
| Hairworks AA | 8 | 8 | – |
| Hairworks Preset | High | High | – |
| No of BG Chars | Ultra+ | Ultra+ | Ultra |
| Shadow Quality | Ultra+ | Ultra+ | Ultra |
| Terrain Quality | Ultra | Ultra+ | Ultra+ |
| Water Quality | Ultra+ | Ultra+ | Ultra+ |
| Foliage Visibility Range | Ultra+ | Ultra+ | Ultra+ |
| Grass Density | Ultra+ | Ultra+ | Ultra |
| Texture Quality | Ultra+ | Ultra+ | Ultra+ |
| Detail Level | Ultra+ | Ultra+ | Ultra+ |
| CPU | Core i9-14900K/Ryzen 7 7800X3D | Core i7-13700K/Ryzen 7 7700X | Core i5-12600/ Ryzen 5 5600 |
| GPU | GeForce RTX 4090 | GeForce RTX 4070/Radeon RX 7900 GRE | GeForce RTX 3060/3060 Ti/4060 |
| Memory | 32GB (dual-channel) | 16GB (dual-channel) | Less than: 16GB (dual-channel) |
| High-end | Midrange | Low-end PC |
| Graphics Settings | RTX 4090 | RTX 4080 | RTX 4070 Ti | RTX 4070 Super | RTX 3080 Ti|RTX 4070 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Resolution | 4K | 4K | 4K | 4K|1440p | 4K|1440p |
| FPS Target | 75 FPS | 60 FPS | 60 FPS | 60 FPS|75 FPS | 60 FPS|75 FPS |
| Frame Gen | On | On | On | On | On |
| Ray Tracing | On | On | On | On | On |
| RTGI | Quality | Quality | Quality | Quality | Quality |
| RT Reflections | On | On | On | On | On |
| RT Shadows | On | On | On | On | On |
| RT Ambient Occlusion | On | On | On | On | On |
| Anti-Aliasing | DLSS Quality | DLSS Quality | DLSS Balanced | DLSS Performance|Balanced | DLSS Performance|Balanced |
| NVIDIA Hairworks | On | On | On | On | On |
| Hairworks AA | 8 | 8 | 8 | 8 | 8 |
| Hairworks Preset | High | High | High | High | High |
| No of BG Chars | Ultra+ | Ultra+ | Ultra+ | Ultra+ | Ultra+ |
| Shadow Quality | Ultra+ | Ultra+ | Ultra+ | Ultra+ | Ultra+ |
| Terrain Quality | Ultra | Ultra+ | Ultra+ | Ultra+ | Ultra+ |
| Water Quality | Ultra+ | Ultra+ | Ultra+ | Ultra+ | Ultra+ |
| Foliage Visibility Range | Ultra+ | Ultra+ | Ultra+ | Ultra+ | Ultra+ |
| Grass Density | Ultra+ | Ultra+ | Ultra+ | Ultra+ | Ultra+ |
| Texture Quality | Ultra+ | Ultra+ | Ultra+ | Ultra+ | Ultra+ |
| Detail Level | Ultra+ | Ultra+ | Ultra+ | Ultra+ | Ultra+ |
The Witcher 3 Settings for Low-end PC
The GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB averages nearly 60 FPS at 1440p Ultra+ with ray-tracing and NVIDIA Hairworks disabled. This is using DLSS upscaling “Performance” and FSR 3 frame generation enabled. Our optimized settings produced a consistent 60 FPS with ray-tracing enabled at 1080p. Be sure to install the FSR 3 FG mod on RTX 30 series GPUs as explained in our low-end guide.
| Graphics Settings | RTX 3060 | RTX 3060 Ti | RTX 4060 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Resolution | 1080p | 1080p | 1080p |
| FPS Target | 60 FPS | 60 FPS | 60 FPS |
| Frame Gen | On | On | On |
| Ray Tracing | On | On | On |
| RTGI | Performance | Performance | Quality |
| RT Reflections | On | On | On |
| RT Shadows | On | On | On |
| RT Ambient Occlusion | On | On | On |
| Anti-Aliasing | DLSS Balanced | DLSS Balanced | DLSS Balanced |
| NVIDIA Hairworks | Off | Off | Off |
| Hairworks AA | – | – | – |
| Hairworks Preset | – | – | – |
| No of BG Chars | Ultra+ | Ultra+ | Ultra+ |
| Shadow Quality | High | Ultra | High |
| Terrain Quality | Ultra | Ultra | Ultra+ |
| Water Quality | Ultra+ | Ultra+ | Ultra+ |
| Foliage Visibility Range | High | Ultra+ | Ultra+ |
| Grass Density | High | Ultra | High |
| Texture Quality | Ultra+ | Ultra+ | Ultra+ |
| Detail Level | Ultra+ | Ultra+ | Ultra+ |
