CD Projekt has published the detailed patch notes, the full list of PC system requirements and an official breakdown of every improvement in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered, a day before the update releases on September 29.
Remastered releases on PC through Steam, GOG, the Epic Games Store and Battle.net, and on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch 2. Players who already own any version of the game, physical or digital, can upgrade to it free of charge within the same platform ecosystem from release. The patch notes were published on The Witcher website.
What the update changes
CD Projekt groups the improvements into four categories: visual, combat, quality of life and miscellaneous. On the visual side the studio lists improved textures for environments, NPCs and monsters, enhancements to foliage, and reworked lighting, rendering and ray tracing. The patch notes add further detail: native DirectX 12 rendering with multithreading, an improved shading model, Ground Truth Ambient Occlusion as a new screen space ambient occlusion option, updated tone mapping, an expanded HDR calibration panel, Ray-Traced HairWorks, and updated textures and models based on assets from The Witcher 3 HD Reworked Project.
Path tracing is exclusive to PC. On PS5 Pro, CD Projekt says PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution enables 60 frames per second with ray tracing turned on.
The combat changes centre on a skill tree the studio says has been entirely rebuilt, alongside revamped animations, new finishers and an adaptive camera. The visual effects for all five witcher signs — Aard, Igni, Yrden, Quen and Axii — have been refreshed, including their upgrade versions, and new visual effects have been added for skills. CD Projekt also lists changes to enemy behaviour.
Never before, however, have we introduced so many extensive, far-reaching changes at once — Remastered is the first release of its kind for The Witcher 3.
Requirements and rollback
The published specification table covers minimum, recommended and ultra configurations alongside separate ray-tracing minimum, ray-tracing recommended and path tracing tiers. CD Projekt says the frame rate targets in the table come from its own QA tests and cautions that occasional fluctuations may occur depending on the scene and gameplay. The studio confirmed that system requirements have changed with the update, and that Remastered introduces an SSD requirement.
Support for Windows 10 is also ending. CD Projekt says that does not mean the game will stop running on Windows 10 with the next update, but that it no longer develops or tests on the system and so cannot guarantee compatibility or performance going forward, and that it supports only components still receiving official updates from their manufacturers.
Players who would rather not move across can roll back. Depending on the platform, CD Projekt says it is possible to revert to version 1.32, listed as Classic, and that once Remastered releases it will also be possible to revert to version 4.04 — the next-generation update issued in 2022.
