^Stay tuned for our video comparison of The Witcher 3’s new ray tracing and performance modes.
The Witcher 3The next-gen update, or “current-gen update,” if you’re one of those people who keep screaming that the PS6 hasn’t been announced yet every time someone says “next-gen,” then it’s finally here after it feels like it’s been around since it was announced. Two years (feels like that, because that’s what it is).
As you rightly suspected, it’s an improvement on something already beautiful. We’re talking clipping and puckering here, not a complete rework, and that’s absolutely fine: anything more than that has the potential to compromise the art direction, as we’ve seen countless times before iconic games get a graphical refresh like that. In fact, if you didn’t do an A/B comparison of them like we did in some specific scenes in the video above, you’d have a hard time noticing a difference. Essentially, there’s more detail in the image – textures are of higher quality, foliage is denser, crowd simulations have kicked in, and the level of detail now fades away further from the camera.
These are fundamental improvements, but of course, since this is the PS5/Series X era, we now have to make the classic choice between ray tracing and performance mode. The pros and cons are absolutely clear on paper: ray tracing means more realistic lighting, shadows, and reflections, but the frame rate is capped at 30fps, and performance gives you a nice silky-smooth 60fps mode, but with more realistic lighting. Flat, shadows and screens are less accurate Spatial reflections basically look good until you tilt the camera. This is a story as old as time.
So which should you choose? Well, for our money, performance mode has the edge here: those extra frames are crucial to making dodging and rolling combat feel good – 30fps gets used to making motion feel sluggish – and outside of indoor environments, the ray tracing implementation here Doesn’t really change much of the equation. If you stare at the river, you’ll notice finer detail in the reflections of the environment. Puddles look better. In a dark, dank interior like Kaer Morhen, the flickering lights and deep shadows bring a lot of drama to an environment that would otherwise fall flat with Performance Mode’s less complex raster rendering-based lighting model .
But these are edge cases: in short, the bells and whistles you miss out on in performance mode are easier sacrifices than the dramatic performance hit that ray tracing requires. Also, the kind of ray tracing we get on consoles is pretty crippling anyway: unless we have a nice hybrid Performance RT option, I wouldn’t even consider it, a la Marvel’s Spider-Man. Alas, this is not always possible.
All in all: A next-gen or current-gen update to The Witcher, with its slew of graphical polish and quality-of-life improvements, makes a beautiful game even better and more exciting. But, as always, don’t expect miracles from consoles – unless you have a powerful PC, ray tracing remains largely out of reach, and having it on the delightful box under your TV The compromises that work require are not worth it.
Additionally, you can now activate motion blur in performance mode without sky glitches, which was a weird bug in the Xbox One X build. If that’s something you remember. just me? OK
