The Witcher 3 Remastered PC Performance Guide: Best Settings, Ray Tracing and 5.01 Fixes

What the Remaster is, and how you get it​

CD Projekt Red (CDPR) announced the remaster on September 29, 2026. Details of the release come from CDPR's own press page, which I'm relying on for the following points:

• It is a free upgrade for existing owners on GOG, Steam, Epic Games Store, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.
• It is also sold on Battle.net and on the Microsoft Store as an Xbox Play Anywhere title.
• It includes both expansions, Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine, even for people who only owned the base game.
• On supported platforms it replaces the Complete Edition.

CDPR says the update brings improved textures, major foliage work, and reworked lighting, rendering and ray tracing. It also adds path tracing on PC. The studio lists combat, animation, skill-system, interface and cross-platform mod changes as well. Digital Foundry's piece is only about the PC technical side, so that's what this article covers.

What changed in the renderer​

Digital Foundry says CDPR reworked several parts of the renderer, including the shading model, image-based lighting and material treatment. The practical result is that the game can look different even with ray tracing off. The ray-tracing mode, meanwhile, gains path tracing.

The first PC build the reviewer compared (5.00c) looked washed out, with weak contrast. Patch 5.01 shipped just before the review went live. According to Digital Foundry, its bloom and tone-mapping changes improved contrast and the depth of darker areas.

Against the 2022-era Complete Edition (build 4.04), the reviewer calls the difference "more nuanced". The old version keeps a punchier, higher-contrast look, but some dark areas get crushed and lose detail. The remaster is more balanced. That is a visual judgment by Digital Foundry, not an official CDPR claim. CDPR's own notes do confirm that 5.01 made visual adjustments covering bloom, tone mapping, character lighting, ray tracing and path tracing.

The performance bill​

Digital Foundry measured these costs on specific hardware and scenes:

These figures come from the configurations the reviewer named. They are not guarantees for every GPU, CPU, resolution or driver.

HairWorks is the interesting case. It used to carry an unreasonably large penalty, and Digital Foundry says that has now been fixed. But a long-standing shading flaw remains: Geralt's white hair looks unnaturally dark in shadow. For that reason the reviewer leaves it off in the recommended settings.

Digital Foundry's recommended settings​

The reviewer publishes two profiles. These are its own recommendations, not official CDPR guidance.

Raster profile

• Ray tracing: off
• HairWorks: off
• Path tracing: off
• Ambient occlusion: GTAO, set to High
• Screen-space reflections: Low
• Background characters: High
• Shadow quality: High
• Screen-space shadows: on
• Terrain quality: High
• Water quality: High
• Foliage visibility range: High
• Grass density: Medium or High
• Texture quality: High (the review notes 8GB of VRAM)
• Detail level: High

RT profile

• Ray tracing: on
• HairWorks: off
• Path tracing: off
• Ray-traced global illumination: Performance
• Ray-traced ambient occlusion: on
• Ray-traced reflections: optional, only where there is GPU headroom
• Ray-traced shadows: off

The approach is to be selective rather than turn everything down. Screen-space reflections are the single heaviest raster option. High is the sweet spot for foliage range, ambient occlusion and shadows. Screen-space shadows and water quality are cheap enough to leave on.

On an RTX 4060, the raster profile reportedly gives an 85% frame-rate lift over Ultra+ and 64% over Ultra, with most options still at High. For the RT profile, the reviewer used an RX 9070 XT with a Ryzen 7 5700X3D. It held around 70fps almost everywhere, but dipped below 60fps in Novigrad's Hierarch Square. That is a CPU-bound hotspot rather than a GPU limit.

Ray tracing: dramatic, but expensive​

Digital Foundry says path tracing and ray-traced global illumination are where the biggest visual gains are. They bring indirect light into interiors and shaded areas more convincingly. They also demand a great deal from both GPU and CPU.

Ray-traced shadows are the weak spot. The review says they add substantial CPU overhead while still showing shadow pop-in and animation problems, so it hard to recommend them even on high-end systems.

My read, and this is general industry knowledge rather than anything the review states: crowded cities are a classic stress test for ray tracing. Every extra animated character adds work for the CPU as it updates the ray-tracing scene. That fits the Hierarch Square result. It also explains why a faster GPU alone may not fix the dips.

Input latency​

The latency testing is the most actionable part for anyone who prefers V-sync to screen tearing. With V-sync on and no low-latency feature, Digital Foundry measured about 175ms of input latency, which it describes as sluggish and heavy. Nvidia Reflex and AMD Anti-Lag 2 brought that to normally under 50ms.

If you use V-sync, turn on whichever of those your GPU supports.

What patch 5.01 fixed on PC​

CDPR's patch notes list these PC-specific fixes, released October 8:

• The GTAO quality setting no longer resets after a restart.
• Dynamic Resolution Scaling (DRS) no longer shows the wrong setting after you change the anti-aliasing mode.
• The game no longer lets you enable graphics settings your GPU doesn't support.
• Switching presets no longer applies DLSS or XeSS on GPUs that don't support them.
• The game no longer sometimes picks the wrong GPU.
• DRS now defaults to off, and DRS-related visual artifacts in certain configurations are fixed.

Other changes in the patch matter too. Foliage now reacts to collisions, and CDPR fixed an issue that could affect save-file data, adding measures for saves that may already have been affected. The policy-consent screen will reappear because of backend issues, so you'll have to confirm your preferences again.

A practical checklist after updating:

1. Confirm you are on 5.01 or later.
2. Re-check your GTAO quality choice after one restart.
3. If you change anti-aliasing modes, verify the DRS setting afterwards.
4. After applying a preset, confirm DLSS or XeSS is something your GPU supports.
5. If you have multiple GPUs, confirm the game is using the one you intended.
6. Expect the first session after an update to stutter while shaders rebuild. A mod author on Nexus Mods notes that the game and the GPU driver rebuild their shader caches after a game update. I haven't verified how long this takes for the base game.

Not everyone is happy​

Player reaction is mixed. One commenter on TechPowerUp's coverage complained that the original ran well on a GTX 960 while the update looks questionable and runs poorly. Another, running maxed-out path tracing on an RTX 5090 with 5.01, was delighted. These are anecdotes, not measurements, but they match Digital Foundry's picture: a big generational lift at the top end, and a heavier game everywhere else.

Community mods that target ray- and path-tracing performance have already appeared on Nexus Mods, with authors claiming gains of roughly 15% in open areas and up to about 45% in cities. I haven't tested those claims. Mods are also fragile across patches, so check version compatibility before installing.

Bottom line​

Digital Foundry's verdict is that the Remaster delivers meaningful technical advances, especially in lighting. It is a heavier, more demanding game than its predecessor, though. Raster settings can be tuned well for mainstream hardware. The CPU cost of some ray-tracing features suggests more polish is still needed. The remaining issues the reviewer names are HairWorks shading and ray-traced shadow behavior, plus severe CPU load in Novigrad's Hierarch Square.

For most players, the sensible approach is:

• Start on the raster profile.
• Add ray-traced global illumination if you have the headroom.
• Treat path tracing as a showcase mode for high-end GPUs.
• Turn on a low-latency feature if you use V-sync.

It's a free upgrade, so the only thing you'll spend is frame rate.