The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered is a free update for existing owners that landed on 29 September 2026. It refreshes lighting, foliage, and character detail, and it adds path tracing on PC. An SSD is now required, and the game runs on 64-bit Windows 11 with DirectX 12. Storage is about 60 GB.
Without ray tracing, the remaster is easier to run than many expected. At Medium, some current cards are faster than they were in the older build. Ultra at native resolution is comfortable on recent mid-range GPUs at 1080p and 1440p. Path tracing is a different story. CD Projekt Red lists an RTX 5080, a Core i9-13900K or Ryzen 7 9800X3D, 16 GB of VRAM, DLSS Performance, and frame generation just to target 60 FPS at 4K.
What the official tiers ask for
Minimum, aimed at 1080p and 30 FPS on Low, calls for a Core i5-8400 or Ryzen 5 2600, a GTX 1660, RX 5500 XT, or Arc A580, and 12 GB of RAM. Recommended, for 1080p and 60 FPS on High without upscaling, steps up to a Core i7-8700K or Ryzen 5 3600X, an RTX 2060 Super, RX 6600 XT, or Arc B580, and 16 GB of RAM. Ultra at 1440p and 60 FPS native points to a Core i7-13700K or Ryzen 7 7700X, an RTX 3070 Ti or RX 6800 class card, and 24 GB of system memory. Ray tracing at 1440p and 60 FPS with upscaling is listed around an RTX 4080 or RX 9070 XT.
Settings that save frames
Use fullscreen, turn VSync off, and cap the frame rate to your monitor if you want steadier frame times. Enable NVIDIA Reflex, AMD Anti-Lag, or the Intel equivalent if you have it. Turn HairWorks off. It still costs a large slice of performance for a small gain in Geralt's hair.
Grass Density and Foliage Visibility Range are the biggest raster cuts. Medium grass and High foliage keep the countryside readable. Shadow Quality and Screen Space Reflections can sit on High. Screen space ambient occlusion at GTAO High is a good balance. Texture Quality and Detail Level can stay high if you have 8 GB of VRAM or more. Water Quality on High is usually enough.
Leave path tracing off unless you have a high-end RTX 50-series card and accept upscaling plus frame generation. If you want ray tracing, start with ray-traced global illumination on Performance or Quality, keep ambient occlusion on, and disable ray-traced shadows. Reflections are optional and show most on water. Ray reconstruction can clean noisy lighting on NVIDIA cards, but turn it off if it softens fine detail.
Upscaling by resolution
Use DLSS on NVIDIA, FSR on AMD, and XeSS on Intel. Quality mode is the right start at 1080p. At 1440p, Quality or Balanced is the usual choice. At 4K, Balanced or Performance recovers the most speed. Dynamic resolution scaling is best left off. Frame generation helps once your base rate is already near 50 FPS or higher. It will not fix a game running in the 20s.
In one high-end test on an RTX 4090, Ultra+ with path tracing averaged 44 FPS, Ultra+ with standard ray tracing averaged 57 FPS, and a trimmed ray-tracing preset reached 87 FPS. That is the practical takeaway. Match the preset to your card, cut grass and HairWorks first, and treat path tracing as a showcase mode rather than the default.