The Witcher 3 Remastered performance test in 4K – RTX 5080 handles path tracing at up to 84 FPS with frame generation
CD Projekt RED has released The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered. The free update is available to all Complete Edition owners, and its main addition is path tracing support on PC.
The team at DSOGaming benchmarked both path tracing and ray tracing and compared image quality in the two modes.
Test system:
AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D processor
32GB of DDR5 RAM at 6000MHz
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 graphics cards
Windows 10 64-bit
NVIDIA Game Ready 617.14 driver
The game has no built-in benchmark, so measurements were taken in the Kaer Morhen tutorial area. That zone is more demanding than the first open-world area and the first village the player encounters.
A problem with Hairworks turned up before testing even began. In the current version, Geralt's hair looks unnatural and plasticky, and performance drops noticeably. Enabling Path Traced Hair, however, raises the frame rate and fixes the Hairworks visual artifacts at the same time.
In practice, Hairworks only works properly alongside path tracing. In ray tracing mode, it's best to turn the feature off until CD Projekt RED releases a fix.
At 1440p with the Ultra+ preset and ray tracing, the RTX 5090 pushes more than 70 FPS even at native resolution. The RTX 5080 manages around 50 FPS under the same conditions and needs DLSS in Quality mode to hit a stable 60 FPS. With path tracing, the frame rate on the RTX 5080 drops to roughly 55 FPS, though that base is enough for comfortable play with frame generation.
RTX 5080 results at 4K with the Ultra+ preset, path tracing, and DLSS 4.5 in Performance mode:
minimum frame rate – 42 FPS
average frame rate – 46 FPS
with frame generation enabled – 77 to 84 FPS
According to DSOGaming, the official system requirements CD Projekt RED published for 4K with path tracing a few days before release turned out to be overstated.
With a base frame rate of around 40 FPS, most players won't notice a meaningful increase in input lag from frame generation, and the RTX 5080 comfortably holds more than 60 FPS. Without path tracing, a smooth 4K picture is possible with ray tracing, DLSS 4.5 in Performance mode, and a G-Sync monitor.
Visually, path tracing delivers mixed results. In some scenes it clearly beats ray tracing, while in others it falls behind. In a few screenshots, for example, Geralt loses his shadows entirely, and the grass stops casting shadows on the ground.
Other scenes go the opposite way, with path tracing producing more realistic lighting and deeper shadows, and grass shadows come out more detailed than with ray tracing. The overall impression depends on the specific location and lighting conditions.
Based on the tests, path tracing in The Witcher 3 Remastered isn't limited to RTX 5090 owners.
On the RTX 5080, the mode works at both 1440p and 4K as long as frame generation and DLSS 4.5 in Performance mode are used.
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