The Witcher 3 Remastered Best Video Settings and Optimizations
Improve your visuals and get better FPS in The Witcher 3 Remastered with these settings.
The Witcher 3 Remastered looks noticeably better than the previous version even without maxing every graphics setting. The problem is that Ultra+, ray tracing, and especially path tracing can cost a large amount of performance for relatively small improvements. Here are the best PC graphics settings for The Witcher 3 Remastered.
Best Witcher 3 Remastered Graphics Settings
These settings are a good starting point for 1440p and 4K systems without ray tracing. We’ll give a complete detailed breakdown of every setting and its associated cost to performance ratio below.
| Setting | Recommended Setting |
|---|---|
| Display Mode | Fullscreen |
| VSync | Off |
| Maximum FPS | Unlimited or match your preferred frame-rate cap |
| Hardware Cursor | On |
| Anti-Aliasing / Upscaling | DLSS Quality / FSR Quality / XeSS Quality |
| Dynamic Resolution Scaling | Off |
| Frame Generation | Optional |
| NVIDIA Reflex | On |
| NVIDIA HairWorks | Off |
| Sharpening | Low |
| Screen Space Ambient Occlusion | GTAO High |
| Screen Space Reflections | High |
| Motion Blur | Preference |
| Blur | Preference |
| Depth of Field | On |
| Bloom | Off |
| Chromatic Aberration | Preference |
| Vignetting | Preference |
| Light Shafts | On |
| Camera Lens Effects | Off |
| Number of Background Characters | High |
| Shadow Quality | High |
| Screen Space Shadows | On |
| Terrain Quality | High |
| Water Quality | High |
| Foliage Visibility Range | High |
| Grass Density | Medium |
| Texture Quality | Ultra+ |
| Detail Level | Ultra |
This setup preserves most of Remastered’s visual improvements without paying the full performance cost of Ultra+. In testing, optimized raster settings produced roughly 25-30% more performance than Ultra+ in several GPU-limited areas while looking very similar during normal gameplay.
Best Ray Tracing Settings in The Witcher 3 Remastered
Ray tracing is much more demanding than the standard graphics presets. If you want to use it without cutting your frame rate unnecessarily, prioritize the effects that make the biggest visual difference.
| Ray Tracing Setting | Recommended Setting |
|---|---|
| Ray Tracing | On |
| Ray-Traced Global Illumination | Performance |
| Ray-Traced Reflections | Off or On if performance allows |
| Ray-Traced Shadows | Off |
| Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion | On |
| Path Tracing | Off |
| DLSS Ray Reconstruction | Off |
| Path-Traced Hair | Off |
Should You Use Ray Tracing?
Ray tracing provides a noticeable visual upgrade, but it is not necessary to make Remastered look good. The largest improvement comes from RTGI, which gives interiors, forests, characters, and indirect lighting more depth. However, ray tracing can roughly halve performance depending on the GPU, scene, and enabled effects.
Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion is also worth enabling because its performance cost is relatively small and it complements RTGI well. On the other hand, Ray-Traced Shadows consumes a lot of performance while occasionally losing fine shadow detail compared with traditional shadow maps.
For example, our RTX 5060 system can comfortably play at 1440p Ultra+ without ray tracing, but cannot maintain 60 FPS after enabling the full RT suite.
Should You Use Path Tracing?
Path tracing can substantially improve lighting in some scenes, but its results are inconsistent. Certain outdoor or strongly lit areas look significantly more realistic, while other scenes can become excessively blue, overexposed, or less visually pleasing than standard ray tracing.
Path Tracing is incredibly taxing on GPU’s and can cause up to 70% performance drops. So keep it off unless you have a high-end system.
The Witcher 3 Remastered Settings and Best Optimizations Explained
Turn Bloom Off for Better Contrast
Remastered uses updated tone mapping and a reworked Bloom implementation. In some scenes, the combination can make daytime environments look washed out and reduce perceived contrast.
Turning Bloom off does not completely change the game’s tone mapping, but it produces stronger contrast and less hazy-looking colors in many outdoor scenes with essentially no meaningful performance difference. Turn it off if you want a clearer image.
Turn NVIDIA HairWorks Off
We currently recommend disabling NVIDIA HairWorks. The visual improvement is not large enough to justify the massive performance cost, especially when the same GPUs effort could instead be used for higher resolution, better foliage, or ray tracing.
Use GTAO High
Set Screen Space Ambient Occlusion to GTAO High. GTAO adds contact shading around objects, characters, vegetation, and environmental geometry, giving scenes significantly more depth. Moving from Off to High only costs a few percent performance in our testing. Ultra costs slightly more while providing a relatively small improvement, making High the better balance.
Keep Screen Space Reflections on High
Screen Space Reflections are one of the more expensive rasterized settings, particularly around water, but dropping to Low can introduce obvious reflection artifacts. High provides much better coverage and cleaner reflective surfaces.
Set Background Characters to High
Number of Background Characters primarily affects populated areas such as Novigrad. Ultra and Ultra+ can place additional load on the CPU without improving most gameplay scenes. High retains the atmosphere of busy settlements while reducing CPU pressure.
Set Shadow Quality to High
Shadow Quality controls both shadow resolution and how far detailed shadows remain visible. Ultra and Ultra+ improve distant shadow coverage, but the visual difference is much easier to notice in comparisons than during normal gameplay.
High is the best balance, but dropping to Medium is a reasonable compromise between performance and quality for budget systems.
Keep Screen Space Shadows enabled, as they add smaller contact shadows and fine environmental detail at relatively little performance cost.
Leave Terrain Quality on High
Terrain Quality has very little visible impact between its higher settings. We were unable to find a meaningful performance or image-quality reason to push it beyond High, so High is the safest optimized setting.
Set Water Quality to High
Water Quality becomes noticeably better at High, with stronger wave and ripple simulation. Low and Medium can also cause more obvious artifacts in screen-space reflections. The performance difference between the higher settings is relatively small, so High is an easy recommendation.
Set Foliage Visibility Range to High
Foliage Visibility Range controls how far grass, bushes, and groups of trees remain visible. Ultra and Ultra+ reduce vegetation pop-in slightly, but the setting becomes increasingly expensive on both the CPU and GPU. High maintains most of the visual improvement while avoiding the heavier cost of the maximum presets.
Set Grass Density to Medium or High
Grass Density is one of the easiest settings to reduce without significantly changing the overall presentation. Ultra and Ultra+ can cost well over 10% performance in vegetation-heavy areas while mainly adding more small grass around Geralt. Set it to Medium for the best performance-to-visual ratio with High being a reasonable upgrade.
Keep Texture Quality as High as Your VRAM Allows
Texture Quality has very little direct performance cost as long as your graphics card has enough VRAM. Modern GPUs should run this at Ultra+ comfortably even with 8GB VRAM.
At 1440p, 8GB cards can generally handle Ultra+ textures without ray tracing. Once RT is enabled, VRAM usage increases enough that reducing Texture Quality to High may prevent memory pressure and stuttering. This is one of the last settings you should lower for additional performance because reducing texture resolution usually does very little for average FPS unless VRAM is already exhausted.
Set Detail Level to Ultra
Detail Level controls the quality of distant structures and environmental LODs. Performance differences between the higher settings are extremely small, while Ultra retains more detail at distance.
Best Settings to Lower First for More FPS
If you are still below your desired frame rate, lower settings in roughly this order:
- Disable Path Tracing
- Disable Ray-Traced Shadows
- Disable RT Reflections
- Switch RTGI from Quality to Performance
- Disable HairWorks
- Lower Grass Density
- Lower Foliage Visibility Range
- Lower Shadow Quality
- Lower Screen Space Reflections
- Move upscaling from Quality to Balanced
Avoid reducing Texture Quality first unless your GPU is running out of VRAM. Terrain Quality and Detail Level are also poor places to look for major performance gains.
While you’re here, also check out the recommended hardware for all displays and resolutions for The Witcher 3 Remastered.
