Today is the day The Witcher 3: Wild HuntThe much-touted free next-gen update is coming to PC and consoles, but it hasn’t gone as well for many of us on PC. People have already taken Twitter, RedditY Vapor with its stories of performance issues ever since the update hit, with Steam reviews claiming it has caused everything from reduced frame rates to HUD issues. The RPS Treehouse has also struggled since installing the 4.0 update, getting very inconsistent frame rates at the new max settings even with an RTX 3080 unless they turn off ray tracing and other new graphical features. Hardware editor James and video pal 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 get Roach running nice and smooth.
anyone with any version You should be able to download the next-gen 4.0 update from The Witcher 3 starting today, but we recommend sticking with the classic version until it’s patched. To do this, you will need to switch to the Classic branch available on Steam and GOG.
In GOG, go to Settings and select Manage installation. Then choose Configure and select the classic version to roll back to from the beta branch dropdown.
In Vapor, go to Properties, then Beta, and select the same Classic branch from the dropdown menu. That should allow you to roll the game back to version 1.32.
That may sound like a long way back from today’s next-gen patch 4.0, but 1.32 was the final patch for the PC version of The Witcher 3, so it should be pretty stable to run.
I booted my copy on GOG and prevented the update, and had no problem running the game. That seems to be the best option at the moment, because trying to revert the game after you’ve installed the update might make things a bit more awkward.
With the 4.0 update installed for the PC version, some players experienced severely reduced frame rates. A player posting on The Witcher subreddit described the game as “unplayable” and said that they had been getting 100-120 fps when walking around Novograd in 4K yesterday. After the update it had dropped to 45fps even with updated drivers. “RTX 3080 here. I went to Novigrad with RT on. It was probably under 30fps no matter the resolution,” said a commenter on the post. “Is incredible.”
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Complete Edition is now available on Vapor, GOGand the epic games storebut yeah, it’s probably worth waiting until CD Projekt Red releases another patch.
