More performance fixes are planned for The Witcher 3 next-gen

pcgamesn.com:

The development team for The Witcher 3 Enhanced Edition is still hard at work improving its performance on PC. More optimisations for the remastered RPG game are in the works, CD Projekt says, including better CPU core utilisation and better performance for ray-traced shadows and global illumination.

Patch 4.01 made some improvements to ray-tracing performance for The Witcher 3: Enhanced Edition earlier this month, but in a forum post dated February 13, CD Projekt flags a few remaining issues the studio is currently working on. These include better use of CPU cores, and improving the performance of the DirectX 12 version of the game, which is the one you’ll be running if you want to see all the fancy ray-traced lighting effects.

That version will see performance boosts in upcoming patches, the studio says.

The Witcher 3 team is also working on reducing the number of lighting leaks that occur with ray-traced global illumination turned on, and it’s investigating the issue of ray-traced vegetation shadows popping in and out depending on how close Geralt is to them and the angle at which they are viewed.

We can also expect to see the horizon-based ambient occlusion option restored on PC. HBAO is a technique for rendering shadows around objects in a scene, and it can be a nice alternative option to ray tracing – although it can be pretty demanding on hardware, too. Of course, if you’re worried about performance, the best Witcher 3 settings will help you strike a balance between frame rate and fidelity.

We’ve assembled a big list of the best open-world games on PC, and the CDPR RPG is on there – along with plenty of other grand adventures.