Witcher 3 Remastered Path Tracing Brings an RTX 5080 Down to 30 FPS

The Witcher 3 is about to get another trip through the upgrade machine, and the price of admission for its most impressive visuals looks steep. With The Witcher 3 Remastered arriving tomorrow, early performance figures show that turning on path tracing pushes even an RTX 5080 down to roughly 30 frames per second when frame generation is switched off.

That is a notable number. The RTX 5080 sits near the top of consumer graphics cards, and a locked-in 30 FPS is not what most players expect from that class of hardware. It suggests the game's full path-traced mode is aimed at the very high end, or at players who are happy to lean on upscaling and frame generation to reach smoother play.

The remaster continues the game's long habit of being brought back up to date. The open-world RPG first launched over a decade ago, then got a next-generation refresh, and this new version pushes its technology further again with a host of improvements meant to keep it in step with current hardware.

Path tracing is the main culprit behind the performance hit. Unlike traditional ray-traced effects, which are applied to selected parts of a scene such as reflections or shadows, path tracing simulates light bouncing through the whole environment. The results can transform lighting in a world as varied as Velen, Novigrad and Skellige, but the computational cost is enormous. Even modern flagship cards struggle when it is enabled without help.

The key detail is the caveat about frame generation. Tests with it disabled show the raw cost of the effect. With frame generation on, players should see a much higher number on screen, though at the cost of added latency and the usual trade-offs that come with generated frames. Upscaling technologies are also likely to play a big role in making the top settings playable for most people.

For anyone without a top-tier card, the picture is less worrying. Path tracing is an optional extra, and lower ray tracing settings or standard rasterized lighting should run far better on more modest systems. The remaster also still has to prove itself in wider testing once players get their hands on it, and driver updates or patches could shift the numbers.

Still, the takeaway is clear. If you want The Witcher 3 at its absolute prettiest, you will need a monster of a PC, and even then you may want to keep the frame generation toggle handy. Launch is tomorrow, and independent benchmarks across a wider range of graphics cards should follow quickly.