^ Stay tuned for our full video assessment of the current state of The Witcher 3, filled with glorious ultrawide footage!
The best thing about PC gaming is having speed and power, be able to beat everything on Ultra and marvel at how effortlessly your rig spits out silky smooth reproduction of any game, activated graphics will make the latest wave of consoles A little white flag that melts into a convenient puddle of liquid.
The worst thing is when you can’t beat everything on ultra, so have to Fiddle: endlessly tweak a dizzying array of switches and sliders to find the perfect balance between performance and visual fidelity. Constantly calibrating a piece of software as complex as software that monitors the status of a nuclear reactor is not just to your specific hardware configuration, but to your tolerance as a human being. Some people don’t mind screen tearing if it frees up some performance headroom. Others, like me, loathe it: as far as I’m concerned, it’s synonymous with “unplayable”. Some people can take ray tracing or leave it. I? If it’s there, I want it on, otherwise I cringe every time screen space reflections rudely disappear when I dare to tilt the camera.
Now, it’s the exact same lesson with high-end PC gaming: you pay a lot of money, and you make a lot of choices. But that’s often only an annoyance in the latest games, especially graphics-intensive ones. Older games are usually the ones you can play as much as you want. The Witcher 3, for example, it was never considered a slouch in the graphics department, and used to run happily on my PC, everything on max, 4K ultrawide, without dropping a single frame. This looks great, since CDPR has a habit of building games for tomorrow’s hardware.
Well, as far as 2015’s action RPG The Witcher 3 is concerned, tomorrow ended last December. Unfortunately for those of us who want to enjoy 2022’s action RPG The Witcher 3, tomorrow’s still a ways off. The clock has been reset. It’s no longer a comfortable “beat everything on the Ultra+” game, but a game of “fiddle until you reach an unwilling compromise”. Frankly, it hurts.
Let’s be clear: I’m not saying the next-gen update will look bad. Looks good. The Witcher 3 is a game full of gothic corners, noble glass windows, muddy puddles, and vast bodies of water surrounded by medieval towers and other sharp corners. It benefits greatly from the implementation of ray tracing. But of course activating this flagship RTX feature comes at a huge performance cost. On consoles, it slows down performance to unacceptable levels below 30fps. On PC, back in December, the first rollout of the next-gen update completely wiped out the framerate, prompting many user complaints and a large number of players rolling back the update and reverting to the previous perfect version.
Fortunately, the latest Witcher 3 patch, 4.02 at the time of writing, improved things a little bit: a less intensive option was added to the ray tracing suite, a performance mode was added to the quality mode rather ridiculously, and overall Performance is generally much better. For my money, I find it makes Witcher 3 with ray tracing a viable prospect right now, whereas before it seemed like we’d have to wait for 5000-series GPUs to get it working.
As I said, this is the nature of high-end PC gaming. If you’re running the latest graphics-intensive games, you have to expect – even with the most advanced hardware on the market – that some tuning will have to be done to hit the sweet spot between fidelity and performance on your particular hardware. good balance.
But The Witcher 3 isn’t one of the latest graphics-intensive games. I played it on the PS4 when it was released about ten years ago. While I understand the merits of keeping everything under the hood fresh and up-to-date, tinkering to support the latest GPU innovations, ensuring the game is still a look in 2034: I can’t help but wonder if the gains are really worth it. If the enhanced fidelity on offer is enhanced enough to justify this huge clock reset, the clock starts ticking when a new system-breaking game is released: a countdown until mid-range PC specs reach their Ambitious, and everyone can enjoy it at its best.
In the end, was the result worth it? Deep down in my heart, I don’t think they are. I don’t want to be misunderstood here: I think real-time ray tracing is one of the most exciting features to come to the GPU space in years. It’s been the holy grail in video game graphics for decades – I remember reading an early Quake demo of the technology in PC Gamer in the early 2000s – and lives in an age where we’re on the cusp of how standard game engines Handling shadows and reflections is really cool. It can fundamentally change the way game worlds are designed. It’s conceivable that it could lead to new gaming experiences given the nature of how light behaves.
But with The Witcher 3, it felt like we had something that looked beautiful and worked beautifully, and now it’s being messed up. After fiddling with the settings on my machine for a few days, I think I’ve reached a place where I can feel at ease with how smooth it runs and how nice it looks. In fact, I think the best and most stress-free compromise is to play it on Xbox Series X in performance mode. As far as visuals go, it’s not far off from the previous version of the Xbox One X performance mode we were running on this hardware. Here’s the crazy thing: The Witcher 3 was so prescient in its future-proofing that the last-gen version achieved a gorgeous 4K60 presentation on hardware that wasn’t even contemplated when it was released.
When the next-gen update was announced, I wondered aloud whether The Witcher 3 needed one. Many people think this is a stupid question. But more than three months since the new and improved game debuted, I’m still not convinced. I want to ask me in 2033.
