Today is the day The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt‘s much-hyped free next-gen update is coming to PC and consoles, but it’s not going so well for most of us on PC. People have already taken it twitter🇧🇷 redditand Steam with their performance woes since the update dropped, Steam reviews claim it’s caused everything from reduced framerates to HUD issues. RPS Treehouse is also having problems after installing the 4.0 update, getting wildly inconsistent framerates at the new max settings even with the RTX 3080 unless I turn off ray tracing and other new graphics features. Hardware editor James and video bud Liam will have more on this later, but for now, here’s how to prevent the next-gen update from ruining your Witcher 3 experience and keep Roach running nice and smooth.
everyone who is any version The Witcher 3 should be able to download the next-gen 4.0 update starting today, but we recommend using the Classic version until we patch it. To do this, you will need to go to the Classic department, which is available on Steam and GOG.
Active GOG, go to Settings and select Manage installation. Then select Configuration and select Classic version to revert from the dropdown list of beta branches.
Active Steam, go to Properties, then Beta, and select the same Classic branch from the drop-down menu. This will allow you to roll the game back to version 1.32.
This may sound like a lot further back than today’s next-gen 4.0 patch, but 1.32 was the last patch for the PC version of The Witcher 3, so it should be pretty stable to run.
I fired up my copy on GOG and ran the update and had no issues running the game. This seems like the best option right now, as trying to roll back the game after installing the update can make things a little more awkward.
With the 4.0 update installed for the PC version, some players were experiencing severely reduced frame rates. A player posts in The Witcher subreddit described the game as “unplayable” and said they were getting 100-120 frames while walking around Novograd in 4K yesterday. After the update it was down to 45fps even with the updated drivers. “The RTX 3080 is here. I went to Novigrad with RT. “Regardless of the resolution, I was probably under 30 frames per second,” said the commenter of the post. “It’s incredible.”
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Complete Edition is now available Steam🇧🇷 GOGand Epic Game Storebut yeah, probably worth a shot for now until CD Projekt Red releases another patch.
