The Witcher 3 Remastered GPU Benchmark: RTX 5090 to Arc B580

PC gamers faced challenges in upgrading or building new gaming PCs throughout the year, with mostly negative news. However, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered offers a positive development. This massive update, available free for existing owners, brings numerous improvements to the now 11-year-old game. Combat has been revamped, the skill tree rebalanced, new finishers added, and monster behavior refined.

REDengine 3 has also seen substantial upgrades, incorporating modern rendering techniques such as ray tracing and path tracing. Enhanced textures, improved foliage, refined lighting and shadows, and an expanded photo mode are among the significant enhancements.

In this investigation, we focus on PC performance, specifically how the remastered version compares to the original game, and how AMD and Nvidia's latest GPUs perform across various quality settings. Our test system utilizes a Ryzen 7 9800X3D paired with 32GB of DDR5-6000 memory to minimize CPU bottlenecks. For AMD testing, we used a pre-release driver version 26.20.15.02, while the GeForce Game Ready driver proved stable without obvious issues.

First, let's examine the visual differences. The remastered version appears brighter than the original, revealing more detail during early morning sequences. Distinct lighting is more evident in distant objects, such as trees. However, the original's darker presentation may appear more realistic. Both versions were tested at the same time, around 3:44 a.m., but neither option is definitively better than the other.

The same applies to the standard Ultra preset, with the remastered version having more powerful lighting and Geralt generally better illuminated. Medium quality also shows a significantly better lit remastered version, which may be the more visually impressive of the two.