The Witcher 3 Next Gen Update Seems Solid on Consoles

The PC version not so much

PS5 screenshot taken by the author

My gaming computer from last year has a Ryzen 5800 CPU and a Radeon 6800XT video card. I went all-in on AMD due to previous frustrations with Intel and Nvidia and some of their corporate behaviors, but that’s a tale for a different day.

This reasonably powerful machine is great for running non ray traced games at stupidly high frame rates, and also does okay with all but the most demanding RT implementations. The advent of AMD’s FSR/FSR2 upscaling system has dramatically helped matters, and I’d call it a solid investment.

I thought it would be the best and easiest place for me to play this week’s new version of the seminal 2015 classic The Witcher 3. After several delays and a change of development team, a fully bespoke “next gen” version of this game has arrived on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox, with a bunch of new improvements alongside a visual overhaul. It’s free for existing users, which is a nice touch…until you see how bad the performance has tanked on PC.

With the game set to 1440p resolution, FSR2 set to its medium “Balanced” mode, and all the new RT features enabled, I get a blistering 30–40 frames per second on my computer. Yes, that’s sarcasm. For reference, on the same machine with the same settings in Cyberpunk 2077 (both…