The Witcher 3 update was released yesterday, and as most people are discovering, on PC the release of CD Projekt RED has not gone according to plan. Many players have been unable to access the game, and even when they do they run into massive issues.

Although the new graphics choices make the game more visually appealing, even players with powerful hardware experience stuttering and random crashes. The villain in all of this is Ray Tracing, where several reviews on Steam show that the technique consumes excessive resources, which even the adoption of technologies such as DLSS cannot compensate for. Using these increases the number of crashes opposed to a nice framerate.

There are bugs in the current version of the game that were not present in the 2015 RPG. Not being able to use the manual save system is one of them. In addition, when ray tracing is active, illumination can vary abruptly, affecting the quality of character models and settings. One would expect CDPR to at least address these problems to improve the game experience.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt's performance issues appear to be less conspicuous on consoles, or at least allow access to the original version of DirectX 11 (although there are reports that it is also quite problematic). CD Projekt RED has not yet commented on the troubles that players have been experiencing.