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The Witcher 3 to be upgraded for next gen consoles, PC, raytracing

by Mark Tyson on 4 September 2020, 13:11

Tags: Cd Projekt Red

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CD Projekt Red has announced that it has a "visually and technically enhanced version" of The Witcher 3 in the pipeline. The next gen version of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Complete Edition will make the best of new CPU, GPU and storage technologies available and will be a free update for owners of the game on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4.

The new version of the game is being designed with the latest and greatest PC and console hardware in mind. Yes, it will include real-time raytracing support, across the base game and all the expansions in the Complete Edition bundle. Additionally, the game will be optimised for faster loading times available on PC, where SSDs and PCIe SSDs are much more prevalent nowadays. Similarly when the game comes to Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 it will take advantage of the much faster storage sub-systems in those consoles.

The Witcher 3; Wild Hunt was released in the summer of 2015 and was considered quite a demanding game at the time. A lot of the early performance issues noticed by gamers were apparently rooted in Nvidia's proprietary HairWorks tech, so AMD GPU owners had to turn off such features or fiddle with Tessellation settings to improve performance.

The next generation edition of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt will be released as a standalone purchase for PC, Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, as well as a free update for everyone who already owns the game on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4. CDPR's development team are said to be working hard on this revamp project but we don't have any estimated timescale for the release.

There are some questions from folk who only own the base version of the game, or even a physical disc version, but I'm sure the upgrade policy will be clarified shortly. Hopefully we will get some nice next-gen The Witcher 3 teaser screens to show off the upgrades while we wait for the next-gen game to become available to play.



HEXUS Forums :: 12 Comments

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From what I can make out, this will just add ray tracing for PC owners? As someone without an RTX card, this is a shame. It would be nice if there were some improvements for non RTX owners.
Spudbynight
From what I can make out, this will just add ray tracing for PC owners? As someone without an RTX card, this is a shame. It would be nice if there were some improvements for non RTX owners.

You could like, read the article you're commenting on ;) It's more than just RTX.
Spudbynight
From what I can make out, this will just add ray tracing for PC owners? As someone without an RTX card, this is a shame. It would be nice if there were some improvements for non RTX owners.

“visually and technically enhanced version”

I'd take it that it's more than just a visual improvement, but what else changes is difficult to determine.

I only started playing a last month, stopped now, as went I on holiday, haven't went back to it yet.

It is an incredible game, the only reason I never played it earlier is I didn't have the time to invest, due to working from home, I had a little extra disposable time.

God is this game huge, the content is immense (full edition with dlc), enjoyable too. I should mention I also skip and ignore the majority of story dialogue, If I were to truly become engrossed and invest my time it would take years to get through.
Yoyoyo69
Spudbynight
From what I can make out, this will just add ray tracing for PC owners? As someone without an RTX card, this is a shame. It would be nice if there were some improvements for non RTX owners.

“visually and technically enhanced version”

I'd take it that it's more than just a visual improvement, but what else changes is difficult to determine.

I only started playing a last month, stopped now, as went I on holiday, haven't went back to it yet.

It is an incredible game, the only reason I never played it earlier is I didn't have the time to invest, due to working from home, I had a little extra disposable time.

God is this game huge, the content is immense (full edition with dlc), enjoyable too. I should mention I also skip and ignore the majority of story dialogue, If I were to truly become engrossed and invest my time it would take years to get through.

I started playing it on game pass on my xbox. Soon realised to get justice out of the game I would need way more time than game pass would give me. It became my one purchase since I got game pass as I could see it was going to be a real time sync. Just wish I could find time to start it on the PC!
Hopefully the HDR is better than the console version which is essentially a HDR container with an SDR image in there.

Any how, great support from CDPR. No messing around with new SKUs for updates to enhanced versions (i.e. Control, new CoD and GTA5).