Why is The Witcher 3 struggling to reach 60 FPS at 1080p with ray tracing?
Asked by
MellowOrbit42
I'm getting frequent stutters and disappointing performance in The Witcher 3. My system has an RX 9060 XT, Ryzen 5 5600, and 16GB of RAM. At 1080p on Ultra settings with ray tracing enabled and FSR 4, I can barely maintain 60 FPS. Since the game is over a decade old, I expected it to run much better. Is this performance normal, and are there settings or versions I should try?
Answers
Your results are fairly normal for that hardware with RT enabled. The RX 9060 XT is still an entry-level card for modern ray-tracing workloads, and this game is often used as a GPU benchmark for exactly that reason. Even much faster cards can lose a large amount of performance when RT is switched on.
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The current version isn’t the same game technically as the original release. A major graphics update added newer rendering features and made the game substantially heavier. The older, non-next-gen version ran smoothly on much weaker hardware, but the updated build is far more demanding.
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Ray tracing is probably the main issue. It’s very demanding in this game and doesn’t seem especially well optimized, so try turning RT off while keeping the other settings high. That should give you a much smoother frame rate.
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I’d test 1080p Ultra with ray tracing disabled first. Older systems were able to run the game around 60 FPS or higher because they used the original rendering path, but comparing those results directly with the updated version isn’t really fair. If you want the older performance, see whether the legacy or classic build is available for your installation.
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