Today launched The Witcher III Next Gen, a major update to one of the most popular and highly rated games of the previous generation. The CD Projekt RED team significantly renewed the graphic partand also introduced the support of the most modern technologies.

The list of novelties is quite long, but we can highlight the most important changes at the technical level improvements in texturing and scene quality, sky and environment as well as on objects and on vegetation and water. Shadows and lighting have also been improved, integrated ray tracing and upscaling technology AMD’s FSR 2.1 and NVIDIA’s DLSS 3.

Ray tracing does an excellent job with lighting. Take, for example, the low impact of indirect lighting on Geralt’s armor.

On consoles, ray tracing only applies to lighting, and this mode is so demanding that it drops the resolution to a dynamic 1440p (often dropping to 1158p) and 30 FPS. However, the PC version does Specific enhancements that are part of “ULTRA+” mode.and this will allow us to enjoy higher graphic quality in the smallest details and also in shadows, vegetation, texturing, grass density and rendering distance from it, water and terrain.

This image allows us to perfectly appreciate the great graphical improvement that CD Projekt RED achieved with this update.

The PC version of The Witcher III Next Gen is also the only one that allows us to do this use ray tracing applied to lighting, shadows, ambient occlusion and reflections. The difference this technology makes when used at all these levels is very large, but as you might imagine, the impact on performance is remarkable.

Lighting, reflections and shadows are masterfully generated in this scene thanks to ray tracing.

I haven’t been able to fully test it yet, but I can tell you that with a GeForce RTX 3090 Ti and maximum quality (everything at maximum, including HairWorks) the game it hovers between 60 and 100 FPS with DLSS in balanced mode. There is an explanation for this huge variability in performance, which is that the demands of the game change a lot depending on the scenario we are in, whether it is open or closed, as well as the game conditions and the time of day in the game. game.

My first contact was positive, the game looks fantastic and I can’t deny that they made me want to play it again but it still needs some optimization and some fixes, as it has stuttering issues and minor graphical glitches. In this regard, I can give you good news, because it has been officially confirmed to me that CD Projekt RED is already preparing a patch to polish The Witcher III Next Gen, so we have to be a little patient.

This moving image is even more striking because the ripples of the moving water affect the reflections in an extremely realistic way.