The experience is indeed definitive – when you disable ray tracing
and PC: ‘Quality Mode’ and ‘Performance Mode’. The former targets 30fps with ray-traced shadows and ambient occlusion in a dynamic 4K resolution, and the latter keeps it locked at 60fps without the use of the lighting technique. There are no ray-traced reflections, only what the game calls ‘higher-quality reflections’.
In my testing, I found that enabling the Ray Tracing option in the graphics menu made for an ultimately more unpleasant gaming experience that wasn’t worth the performance hit. That’s because The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt targets 30fps in this mode, but didn’t appear to be consistently outputting at this rate as there were noticeable stutters and moments of slow down which came through in most situations.
Whether I was riding through one of the many gorgeous landscapes on Roach in the early hours of the game, fighting off both humans and beasts alike with swordplay, casting signs, or just walking around a tavern, enabling the Ray Tracing option just didn’t play as well as it should. In contrast, disabling this mode and opting to prefer performance was a silky smooth experience.
It was after this moment with The Witcher 3’s next-gen update that I made the decision to forgo the Ray Tracing Mode and the substantial performance impact it brought with it. It’s ultimately disappointing that a game released back in 2015 is having these kinds of hiccups on cutting-edge console hardware. As this is an update, however, it’s entirely possible that we could see a hotfix for this issue in the near future, or even another update down the line which goes harder on ray tracing.
Dynamic 4K is not the same as native 2160p resolution. This essentially means that while the console may output in 4K at all times, the game itself will render at differing resolutions to scale with the performance onscreen.
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