For smoother play in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered on PC, tune settings in stages rather than dropping everything to Low: choose a sustainable resolution and frame-rate target, test the upscaler your GPU supports, and then consider turning off path tracing if performance still falls short. The guidance here is for the Remastered PC release, current to October 7, 2026—not a universal preset for the 2015 original or the 2022 Next-Gen build.
Why older Witcher 3 settings advice may not apply
The Remastered PC version, released September 29, 2026, is a free upgrade for existing owners on supported platforms, according to CD PROJEKT RED. Its rendering has changed substantially: the publisher describes native DirectX 12 rendering with multithreading, GTAO and ray-traced local shadows, along with updates to shading, tone mapping, reflections, and other features. NVIDIA says the PC build is DirectX 12 only, so advice to switch this version to DirectX 11 does not apply.
These differences matter when following older guides: settings and performance results from the original game are not reliable benchmarks for Remastered. NVIDIA’s legacy guide, for example, reports an HBAO+ versus SSAO comparison from the original DirectX 11-era game; it should not be treated as a current Remastered result.
How to improve Witcher 3 PC performance without flattening the image
There is no single best Witcher 3 Remastered settings list for every PC. CD PROJEKT RED says performance varies with the scene, hardware configuration, graphics settings, and output resolution, and that frame rates may fluctuate during play. Use a repeatable scene and change one setting at a time so you can tell what actually helps on your system.
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- Pick a realistic resolution and frame-rate target. Start with the output resolution and refresh-rate goal your PC can sustain. Resolution has a significant effect on performance, according to the publisher. If you change resolution and several quality settings together, it becomes harder to identify which adjustment made the difference.
- Test an upscaler supported by your GPU. The official PC feature list includes NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 with Ray Reconstruction; AMD FSR 4 with Frame Generation and Anti-Lag 2 on Radeon RX 7000 Series and newer, with FSR 2 used on unsupported GPUs; and Intel XeSS 2.0 with Frame Generation and Low Latency. Availability depends on hardware. The listed features do not establish a universally best option, so compare image clarity and stability, frame rate and frame-time consistency, and input latency at your own output resolution.
- If performance is still short, test turning off path tracing. Path tracing is an advanced lighting option. NVIDIA explains that it unifies lighting and rendering rather than combining separate ray-traced and rasterized effects; disabling it is therefore a reasonable performance-first test. That is a tuning suggestion based on the feature description, not a measured FPS guarantee for this release.
- Keep other visual settings moderate unless testing points to a bottleneck. Do not assume every setting needs to be Low. Current official materials do not provide a readable, setting-by-setting FPS cost table, so any savings from a change depend on the system and scene.
Which graphics features are available in the Remastered PC version?
CD PROJEKT RED’s current PC feature notes list the following features. Their presence does not mean every GPU supports every option or that the options have equal performance or image-quality results.
- Path Tracing: an advanced lighting option to test disabling if you need more performance.
- NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 with Ray Reconstruction: an NVIDIA feature listed for the PC release.
- AMD FSR 4: Frame Generation and Anti-Lag 2 are listed for Radeon RX 7000 Series and newer; unsupported GPUs use FSR 2.
- Intel XeSS 2.0: listed with Frame Generation and Low Latency.
- Ray-Traced HairWorks: the publisher’s feature list includes this option, while its launch-era advisory reported a performance issue (see below).
CD PROJEKT RED does not publish a same-system comparison of these upscalers in the cited feature notes, and the official requirements page cautions that performance varies with scene, system, settings, and resolution. Treat your own repeatable comparison—not a universal ranking—as the basis for choosing.
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Should you turn off HairWorks?
On September 30, 2026, GamesRadar reproduced a launch-era advisory from CD PROJEKT RED: “We’ve identified an issue related to NVIDIA Hairworks that may significantly affect performance.” The accompanying instruction was: “We recommend disabling that setting until this is addressed in a patch.” That was a temporary recommendation, not proof that HairWorks should always be disabled now. Check current patch notes before relying on it; if the issue remains unresolved on your installed version, disabling HairWorks is the publisher’s stated workaround.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What the system requirements do—and do not—tell you
CD PROJEKT RED’s official requirements page says its expected FPS targets come from QA testing and can fluctuate by scene; it also says performance varies with system configuration, settings, and output resolution. The detailed hardware table is embedded as an image rather than readable text in the page material available here, so this article does not reproduce its hardware rows or infer a universal FPS target.
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The same page says Windows 10 will no longer be officially supported and an SSD is required for the latest technical enhancements. The publisher associates the SSD with faster loading and smoother asset streaming; that is not evidence that an SSD increases average FPS.
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