The Witcher 3 Remastered was released yesterday as a free update for existing owners of the game, bringing CD Projekt Red’s popular RPG up to date with a major set of upgrades designed to modernize the experience. The remaster improves several parts of the original game, including its skill system, combat, visuals, and other gameplay elements.

Those improvements also come with higher hardware demands. While the visual upgrades naturally put more pressure on the graphics card, early testing shows that the remaster can also be extremely demanding on the CPU, particularly once path tracing is enabled. We’ve already seen a flurry of negative Steam reviews typically linked to tougher performance goals.

CPU benchmarks for The Witcher 3 Remastered

The folks over at PC Games Hardware recently added The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered to their CPU testing suite and put a range of processors through the game. For the benchmark, they used a demanding section of Toussaint that starts around the marketplace at Le Gran Place and continues through several streets before reaching the large city gate. The changing environment and asset streaming make this area particularly demanding on processors.

For the tests, PC Games Hardware pushed the graphical settings to their maximum and enabled path tracing. The resolution was lowered further using DLSS to reduce the GPU bottleneck and put more emphasis on CPU performance.

The results show just how heavy the game can become. The Core i9-14900KS managed 59.2 FPS in the tested configuration, falling just short of the 60 FPS mark. The Ryzen 7 7800X3D dropped slightly lower to 58.9 FPS, while the Ryzen 7 9700X and Core i7-13700K managed 55.5 and 55.7 FPS, respectively.

Older hardware has an even harder time. PC Games Hardware noted that the Ryzen 7 5800X3D struggled to provide consistently smooth performance despite its additional cache delivering a substantial 24% performance improvement. Intel’s newer Arrow Lake architecture also couldn’t comfortably push the game beyond 60 FPS in this demanding scenario.

AMD’s latest X3D processors were among the strongest performers. The Ryzen 7 9800X3D reached 70.7 FPS, while the Ryzen 7 9850X3D managed 73 FPS. The Ryzen 9 9950X3D produced 72.4 FPS, showing once again how useful AMD’s additional cache can be in CPU-heavy games.

Path tracing appears to be a major part of the problem. PC Games Hardware found that switching from path tracing to standard ray tracing improved performance by more than 30% when CPU-limited. Turning ray tracing off entirely resulted in over 137% more FPS, highlighting that these effects aren’t solely putting additional pressure on the GPU. As CapFrameX puts it, the path tracing setting is a “CPU killer”. The update also added support for DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction.

So, players struggling with CPU-related performance in The Witcher 3 Remastered may want to start with the ray tracing settings. Path tracing can deliver the best version of the game’s upgraded visuals, but the early benchmarks show that you’ll need a seriously powerful processor if you’re aiming for consistently high frame rates with everything turned up.

About the Author

Abdul Haddi

Abdul is a tech writer and Editor for PC Guide, specializing in all things tech, gaming, and hardware.