The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has yet to fade into gaming obscurity. CD Projekt Red has even recently updated the title with a next gen overhaul to bring its graphical fidelity on par with the more recent triple-A titles. Sadly, the PC version of this next gen update did not launch with grace, as it was plagued with bugs. The beloved title has now gotten a 4.01 patch on PC, claiming to improve the overall stability and performance of the game. However, for players not utilizing the ray tracing settings added with the overhaul, this new update actually hurts The Witcher 3’s performance.
James Archer of Rock Paper Shotgun recently tested the new performance and ray-traced global illumination settings, discovering that something is quite broken with the patch for anyone not using ray tracing. The global illumination setting performs great even with lower ray tracing settings, but there are significant framerate drops when utilizing non-ray traced Ultra and High graphic presets.
Arguably, some of this frame rate loss is due to a bug fix added in the 4.01 patch. Previously, the title would always show low-quality reflections due to a certain bug, and with the screen space reflections fix, it can now display higher-quality reflections. However, this should not account for cutting the max frame rates almost in half after the patch.
Related: The Witcher 3’s next-gen update is beloved by fans, even if it’s buggier than an Endrega nest
This issue is not limited to just this one test as many others have been reporting similar frame rate drops when not using ray tracing after the patch. It is also relevant to note that this issue only persists when using DirectX 12. Players looking to see frame rates similar to the previous iteration only have the options of rolling back to a previous patch or using DirectX 11 until the issue is resolved.
