CD Projekt Red has expanded its system requirements for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Remastered to include four new presets, showing what hardware is needed to run the game's Ultra, ray-tracing, and path-tracing presets. The Witcher 3 development team announced the updated requirements in a blog post, stating that an RTX 5080 is required to run the game in its full path-tracing mode at 4K.
Each of the four presets, Ultra, RT Minimum, RT Recommended, and Path Tracing, has specific resolution and frame rate targets, beyond just the graphics presets themselves. The first three presets target either 1080p or 1440p with a 30 or 60 FPS target, but CD Projekt Red is targeting 4K for the Path Tracing mode at 60 FPS.
For the Ultra Preset, the devs are targeting 1440p and 60 FPS for its hardware requirements page. To run it, gamers will need at a minimum a Core i7-13700K or Ryzen 7 7700X for the CPU, and an RTX 3070 Ti, RX 6800 XT, or Arc B580 for the GPU, along with 24GB of RAM. That said, the B580 is the only GPU on the list that requires XeSS upscaling to reach the aforementioned frame rate and resolution targets.
The RT Minimum preset is less demanding than the Ultra requirements page, despite using ray tracing, and requires enough GPU power to run the game at only 1080p at 30 FPS with upscaling. Gamers will need a Core i7-11700K or Ryzen 7 5800X for the CPU, and an RTX 2060, RX 6600 XT, or Arc B580 for the GPU to run this preset. Gamers will also need 16GB of RAM to run this mode.
The RT Recommended requirements target 1440p with upscaling and 60 FPS, requiring at a minimum a Core i7-13700K or Ryzen 7 7700X for the CPU and an RTX 4080 or RX 9070 XT for the GPU, along with 24GB of RAM. However, the Path Tracing mode is by far the most demanding preset, targeting 4K with upscaling and 60 FPS with frame generation. For the CPU requirements, CD Projekt Red has selected the Core i9-13900K and Ryzen 7 9800X3D as the minimum requirements to run this mode for the CPU, and an RTX 5080 for the GPU.
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How does the RTX 5080 perform in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Remastered at 4K with Path Tracing enabled?
Which upscaling and frame-generation technologies does The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Remastered support for Path Tracing?
What visual differences does Path Tracing add over the RT Recommended preset in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Remastered?
How much VRAM does The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Remastered require for its Path Tracing preset?
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CD Projekt Red's results confirm that the more demanding path-tracing mode will be extremely demanding to run, at least at 4K on modern GPUs. Thankfully, the game's requirements for the rasterized graphics presets are far less demanding, which should make the game run well on older hardware. We'll know more about the game's performance once the remaster drops tomorrow; that said, some content creators have already published benchmark results of the remaster on YouTube. Analysts are expecting The Witcher 3 remaster to be a huge success, and amass up to 75 million copies before the Songs of the Past expansion arrives in 2027.
