A hotfix has been released to try to alleviate performance issues (opens in new tab) that PC players have been facing with the next-gen update (opens in new tab) for The Witcher 3. The update "improves overall game stability and performance" and is available now.

If you're reminiscing about your witching days in The Witcher 3 and want to start a new game+, you'd better install the latest patch before you do. it's about 3GB on Steam, but compressed a bit smaller on GOG at 1.9GB. the GOG and Steam overlays are in-game GOG and Steam overlays in-game.

The next-gen update for The Witcher 3 was just released last week, and like many of you, I too no longer needed a reason to fire up the game for extended play. The new update brought gorgeous improvements to the look of the game, including new Ultra+ textures, image quality settings, and raytracing effects.

All great stuff, but unfortunately the launch was not entirely smooth sailing; when we tried to launch the game on AMD's latest RX 7900 XTX, we ran into horrible performance issues. Stuttering was particularly bad, and it would crash erratically back to the desktop, even with the ray tracing and graphics presets turned down to modest settings. I was beginning to think that AMD's new high-end GPUs were not all they were cracked up to be.

Unfortunately, however, it was not all my GPU's fault. I replaced several GPUs on my machine and had the same problem. Apparently the next-gen update of The Witcher 3 is incompatible with many PCs, and the DirectX 12 version of the game (the version with all the fancy new RT effects) seems to be the worst.

The DirectX 11 version of the game was a little better, but if you were waiting for a big visual upgrade to play, having to turn off half of the big new graphics changes just to play the game at anything resembling frame rates is Not great.

But perhaps this hotfix will help somewhat; there are reports on Reddit (opens in new tab) that the new hotfix patch worked well, as do replies to The Witcher account on Twitter (opens in new tab). We'll keep an eye on this one to see what the overall verdict is, but in the meantime, if you've been hungry for ray-traced Geralt all weekend, it's worth a try.

With a major update to the visual side of "The Witcher 3" shortly after its release, it's hard to imagine finding a single performance panacea.