Next-Gen Witcher 3 Proves Ray Tracing is Holy Grail No One Can Find

I wasn't particularly excited – I was curious and I knew that I would definitely check out the new patch. The Witcher 3 is rather a thing of the past for me, but then I'm a kind of gamer who still has Dungeon Keeper and Jagged Alliance 2 installed on my PC. So, I thought that in mid-December, I would sit down one fine evening and download The Witcher 3, which I hadn't launched on Steam for a long time, to see what the new robes looked like.

And check I did. My first impression: "I must have forgotten about something." Maybe I have another game running, minimized? Maybe I'm installing something in the background? A game from 2015 running on my gaming rig that I got for the price of at least two Civics like it was the original Crysis (meaning: badly). It can't be that this great, but already venerable game requires the processing power that's not even available yet from a GPU. Unfortunately, it quickly turned out to be the case.

The king's new robes (are extra demanding)

In theory, it was all dandy and beautiful. The old game, just after many small improvements, enriched with better textures and new technologies – from new DLSS to the infamous, and still misunderstood, ray tracing. No great philosophy – what could possibly go wrong? And yet it went – Cyberpunk 2077 on ultra with RT enabled runs better than The Witcher 3 on similar settings. The difference is that Cyberpunk not only works, but also – obviously – looks better.

In fact, the framerate of The Witcher 3 dropped so much that... I had to disable ray tracing. Do you understand? I own the RTX 3090, and I had to turn off ray tracing in a seven-year-old game, because the jitter made it impossible to play. Well, if you insisted, you could play it this way. After all, many people claimed that the human eye can't tell the difference between 30 and 60 frames per second (but try to take away smooth 60 FPS from PS5 and XSX owners today, and it will lead to riots). The indignation, however, is justified, because it shouldn't work like that. The patch for the current generation consoles has been in development for a long time. Certainly, before the premiere, the PC version was tested on both the latest cards and the slightly older ones. Right?

Right?!

The truth, however, may be completely different. The state in which the next-gen patch was released, until recently, enraged me. Today, it's more of a feeling of resignation, because I'm really tired of how subsequent behemoths – who calmly spend a lot of money on nonsense and overhyped marketing – can't test their games properly, and then – before the bomb explodes in the media – address their problems and provide a ready product.

In one podcast I've recently heard, there came up the subject of the Quatar 2022 World Cup. It was stated there that fans of soccer (mostly Europeans) do not follow a logical chain of cause and effect. Say, if you buy a refrigerator and find out that it doesn't work, you will probably avoid the given brand from then on. This does not seem to apply to soccer fandom. A team can give the most embarrassing performance in the history of the universe; the sport may be the domain of exploitation, international cartels, and corruption, and fans will keep consuming the sport like we were still in Ancient Rome.

They suspend the lgoic, reflection on all external contexts – including moral or ethical ones – focusing on the illusion of what is either happening now or will happen in the future. They don't care if they felt a powerful disappointment in the past.

You see, I have the impression that we have been heading in a similar direction for many years in gaming. Indignation is temporary, additionally secured by many footnotes and conditions that allow for a possible return to the beloved team – or the game – without much loss to our own sense of honor. It doesn't matter how much someone betrays us, how much they fail us. We don't notice what we were robbed of.

Even if we complain for a moment, shout, clench our fists, in a year, two, three or five we will buy another Call of Duty or Diablo again, even though we know that the publisher may well have forgotten who these games are addressed for. We have short memories, but we equally don't really care anymore. What we cannot deny ourselves in one place, we will do in another – we will make up for it, for example by donating to a charity or declaring that limit animal products.

We're not really customers anymore, and we stopped being players a long time ago; we are fans who, when properly stimulated, will forgive all lies, forget about mistakes and scream that nothing happened. Tempted by the promise of fulfilling dreams, we will fantasize about how beautiful and amazing worlds we will visit. Maybe it didn't work now, but hey, it's the XYZ studio, that alone is reason to wait.

And no one – really no one can break this chain of absurdity.

Holy Grail: Ray Tracing

Ray tracing is currently a clever marketing slogan on the one hand, and a really big technological achievement on the other. The way it is implemented – and above all, how it's advertised – almost always causes disappointment and the effect opposite from the expected one. And the new-old The Witcher 3 is a great example of this.

Ray tracing in the console version is supposed to be there, but – and this seems extremely important – ray tracing is not always the same. Different studios understand its implementation differently, throwing this buzzword around so that you – tempted by graphics bells and whistles – pay through the nose. After the release of the next-gen patch, I saw videos and articles of various creators and influencers online, which said something like: reflections (e.g. on the surface of the lake) have never been so beautiful in The Witcher 3, thanks to the ray tracing added in the PS5 edition. And you know what? No greater nonsense can be said about this game.

There is NO RAY TRACING in the PS5 and XSX versions!!! No!? But it said something else! Ok, so there is actually RT here, but it's not the one responsible for reflections! In the case of this particular game, this technology is only available on PC. Any reflections you see on PS5 are based on good ol' rendering. There's a fitting quote from the book saga: "You've mistaken the stars reflected on the surface of the lake at night for the heavens."

So, what was so wrong about the above-mentioned statement? When the player hears "ray tracing", they think of beautiful, realistic reflections – Spider-Man reflected in the glass of passing skyscrapers, puddles on the streets of Cyberpunk and the endless lights of a large metropolis. However, that's not what the technology is largely about – i.e. simply put, various shadows that give the scene depth and more realistic lighting (which in general may even be less effective than "non-raytraced", because old rendering methods, although distorted, allowed and still allow to create incredibly beautiful and charming locations).

Ray tracing in The Witcher 3 on consoles is just that type of RT – a cool, but terribly demanding technology, which in addition was deprived of its most popular and recognizable element – reflections. So why was it implemented on consoles at all?

Well, perhaps just to show that this next-gen update is next-gen indeed. This, I'm afraid, is just a marketing ploy, as the RT mode in The Witcher 3 on consoles seems "unplayable" compared to the relatively smooth performance mode. In addition, players don't see such a big difference in the graphics (because, for example, they do not see reflections, and the fact that shadows and sunbeams seem to fare better is difficult to recognize without careful and long scrutiny).

Before installing the patch, don't forget to uninstall old mods, otherwise you will see such grass.

I have deviated from the topic of The Witcher 3 on PC to highlight the problem of today's market. While you can experience The Witcher 3's RT in its supposedly full glory on PC, it's hard to actually run it. Whether it's a matter of our hardware or the game's optimization – it's up to debate. You must remember, however, that RT is a technology that is still being developed; not to say experimental – it works rather crudely, generating huge performance issues.

Ray tracing, as I've already mentioned, is not always the same thing – the creators, when talking about RT, often mean different things. In some cases, it's about better, more realistic shadows, while others boast beautiful lights and puddles of water where you will see detailed reflections of passing cars. And although sometimes developers try to be more specific (eg. in the announcement of the next-gen patch for The Witcher 3, it was indicated with small font that these reflections only apply to the PC version), so marketing will sell it to you simply as "super-duper-cutting-edge" tech. And in some cases, RT simply brings no bells and whistles!

A separate issue is, of course, optimization, which in recently released PC games calls for vengeance.You can basically turn off ray tracing in Warhammer: Darktide (and prolly no one will notice the difference). In The Callisto Protocol... you surely know what The Callisto Protocol looks like on PC. It's a pity that The Witcher 3 followed the same path.

It's gotten awfully foggy in this Witcher 3.

"They deceived me, the bunch"

You'd be forgotten to thing that. I certainly did. We are fed marketing slogans and the promises of "experience" – instead of simply getting polished games. Understating important details – as in the case of ray tracing mode – is another opportunity to increase profits. Our ignorance is an ace in the sleeves of those who decide how to sell a product. As customers, we still had rights – today, we just accept it and forget. We forgive because we hope for a better tomorrow. Or maybe it would just be enough to explain to us that RT should not be the main thrust of a game in most cases – as a technology that still has a long way to go, "even" on PC. I'm just not sure if game and hardware developers would earn as much as they do today.

And you know... The funniest thing about all this is that The Witcher 3 is basically as good as it was (even better on consoles, because it's way smoother). Sure, I'm already laughing at these crude animations and the way Geralt interacts with stuff, even a fence standing in his way. I'm tired of the lengthy dialogues that I've heard a thousand times. The simple simple combat is irritating. But it's still the same, good, old Witcher we played 7 years ago. And probably the most important thing we have to remember is exactly that this is a game from 7 years ago and if some of you bought it in 2022 expecting amazing bells and whistles, you will not see them, or – in the case of the PC version – you will not be able to run them.