CD Projekt Red’s latest update forThe Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s recent re-release appears to be a bit of a double-edged blade. As beautiful as the next-gen version of the game may be thanks to its reliance on ray-traced rendering pipelines, such a substantial visual upgrade didn’t come for free, causing some trouble with the game’s performance.

The Witcher 3’s update 4.01came out early in February, promising a series of optimizations and general improvements to the game’s visual fidelity. Performance, too, was a major point of contention, and CD Projekt Red assured fans that this new build of the game would perform better on all pertinent platforms. Now that experts have had the chance to thoroughly test update 4.01, however, it seems that the situation is still rather rocky.

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According to Eurogamer’s recent in-depth analysis ofThe Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s February update, patch 4.01 is fairly substantial indeed, but it isn’t without fault. Testing has shown that the pros do outweigh the cons, and players can expect fewer crashes, improved reflection resolution, and optimized ray-traced global illumination, which all boils down to bolstered performance at the cost of a minor reduction to the quality of the game’s ray tracing pipeline. The curious and problematic portion of the update, however, lies in the fact that while the consoles' RT-enabled modes have seen a performance uplift, the dedicated performance modes now run worse than they did before 4.01 came out.

WhileThe Witcher 3could certainly go toe-to-toe with some ofthe most visually impressive games on the market, its performance is still up in the air. Thankfully, PC players do get a mild performance improvement, too, thanks to the game now being slightly less reliant on CPU performance than it was at launch. This, combined with the new lower-end RTGI setting, means that players have better control over the game’s balance between visual fidelity and performance. Yet, Eurogamer’s analysis does warn that the game still has numerous performance-related problems in place.

The expectations for CD Projekt Red in 2023aren’t overly high, all things considered. WhileCyberpunk 2077is due to receive its first (and only) major expansion pack sometime during the year, the studio doesn’t have any other big projects slated for 2023. It’s possible, then, thatThe Witcher 3’s next-gen build will get the attention it needs to run better on a wide spectrum of hardware, but CDPR is yet to provide further insight on how this may be accomplished.

While CD Projekt Red continues in gettingTW3to run as well as it can, the studio has outsourced the development of theremake of the firstWitchergameto a different Polish game devloper: Fool’s Theory. This development team’s only previous standalone offering was the niche stealth RPGSeven: The Days Long Gone. However, Fool’s Theory also did work as a support studio on the productions ofBaldur’s Gate 3,Divinity: Original Sin 2, andOutriders, to name a few, which means it does have plenty of experience with the genre.

The Witcher 3: Wild Huntis available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.

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