The Witcher 3 Next-Gen

The massive next-gen update for The Witcher 3 is here!

Aside from improved gameplay features such as a better combat camera, heavily upgraded visuals, and much more, one major question remains: How well does it perform on the Steam Deck? Joining me today is the one and only Kyle a.k.a. Cryobyte. You know, the guy that does the math so you don’t have to.

First things first: The game will take up around 58 gigs on your Steam Deck. Upon starting, you will be greeted with CDPR’s proprietary launcher you may already know from Cyberpunk 2077, showcasing recent news and the ability to log in to GOG in order to enable cross-progression and some other neat stuff. There you will also be able to choose between DirectX 11 and 12. While the latter comes with the biggest rendering improvements and all the sexy next-gen tech such as real-time ray-traced global illumination, shadows, reflections, and more, this also enables FSR2. We would usually opt for that exact feature, but this time we simply optimized for dx11 instead and ditch 12 for now, simply of perfomance issues.

If you´re interested to play Witcher 3 in the last-gen version, you can opt into the "classic" beta branch in the game's Steam properties. This may result in slightly better performance without the next-gen improvements and added content updates. But since we’re all here for the juicy stuff, we focus on the next-gen upgrade, right?

Kyle -> agreeing(?) especially in hindsight of the differences between DX11 and 12, underlining the surprises along the way

How look my hair today?

Well… while we're still talking about a release from 2015, achieving a consistent Golden 40 experience wasn’t as difficult as I expected. However we want to clearly advise against using Nvidia Hairworks on Steam Deck. The performance impact of this proprietary gimmick is anything but a good fit for what we’re trying to achieve. Aside from the fact that performance is horrible, NVIDIA themselves have forgotten about HairWorks. Both HairWorks development documentation and the actual development kit download pages have been pulled from NVIDIA's website completely.

Settings explained

We will stick to Fullscreen, V-sync disabled, native res at 800p, and an unlimited frame rate. If you happen to be a Deckverse veteran, you may ask why we’re resorting to disabling V-Sync all of the sudden. In the past, we often had to lock the frame rate through in-engine options like V-Sync, because the limiter in the quick action menu often resulted in pretty bad input lag. The recent SteamOS 3.4 update however introduced an „Allow tearing“ option in the quick action menu, which disables the systemwide forced triple-buffered V-Sync.

This means in the long run, you could now simply go for a 40FPS limit at 40Hz in the quick action menu, toggle the „tearing“-option on and make sure to disable any in-engine limiter or vertical sync setting. Basically, that’s correct, but the results may still vary on a per-game basis.

While the game’s stock presets Low, Medium, High, Ultra, and Ultra Plus may come with vastly different results in terms of the overall frame rate, there are surprising performance hogs hidden between the lines, you wouldn’t expect at the first glance; especially given the visual results.

We also opted for using the Temporal Anti-Aliasing Upscaler all the time, because we’re fairly limited here. The alternatives are FXAA or no anti-aliasing at all - which both won’t do the visual brilliance nor the small little details of the Northern Kingdoms justice at all.

Comparing the stock presets against each other you’ll immediately notice, that there’s a significant jump in terms of overall detail and vibrancy between them. Especially foliage and shadows, as well as their render distances, feel like the biggest benefits on the higher settings, but not without a major punch on the frame rate and added rendering stutter.

In terms of a fidelity-to-performance impact ratio, the settings that most affect visuals are actually the cheapest. You will surely want to go for the highest Terrain, Texture Quality, and Detail Level. We highly recommend also trying to use the highest possible Water Quality. While the performance cost is rather small, the results are pretty impressive - especially compared to the lower Water Quality settings that don't even visually interact with your boat or character.

Both Foliage Visibility Range and Detail Level play a bigger role during traversal on horseback. Meanwhile, the Numbers of Background Characters setting tends to bring a massive performance toll the moment you enter cities and villages. But you will see how we handled this in the presets section.

Shadow Quality is an interesting one, because it not only defines the overall clarity and shadow detail, but also the rendering distance. Still - in the end, we went for the Shadow Quality set to High for the 30 and Medium for the 40 FPS goal here which felt like the best compromise.

Regarding the SSAO and SSR: We didn’t notice any major difference between SSR set to low or High, so we went for low. SSAO is another story since it has a massive impact on the final look and overall depth of the scene. Right, so it’s a nobrainer to leave Ambient Occlusion enabled. But they ditched HBAO+ from the classic release, which would’ve looked superior. But at a cost, so let’s roll with it.

Now onto the setting that hurts the most: Grass Density. That one, I tell you that, is a bad boy. More Grass is definitely nice, but not at the cost of nearly 40% of the possible performance. While the grass density looks more vivid on higher settings and definitely complements the game’s hand-crafted environments, it somehow ended up as the most expensive one.

If you want to learn how to squeeze even more performance out of your Steam Deck check definitely Cryobyte’s Deep Dive Video.

Further down you´ll find both presets in a Overview (Prestine 30 and Golden 40). Multiple, because I decided, in this case, it’s totally worth having two distinctive sets of settings to either have a more fluid experience or the best possible visuals on the Steam Deck. Especially since we’re talking about such a timeless masterpiece.

Don´t forget to set the game´s refresh rate to 60Hz and limit the framerate to 30, but also enable "allow tearing", combined with VSync being disabled, this will result in less input latency.

There's nothing left to say aside from that we hope you will enjoy your adventures in the Northern Kingdoms.

Pristine 30 / Golden 40 Settings

Pristine 30

In-game:

Launcher

DirectX 11

Display

Display Mode	Fullscreen
Vsync	Off
Resolution	1280x800
Maximum FPS	Unlimited

Graphics

Anti-Aliasing	TAAU
Sharpening	Low
Screen Space Ambient Occlusion	SSAO
Screen Space Reflections	Low
Motion Blur	Off
Blur	On
Bloom	On
Depth of Field	On
Chromatic Aberration	Off
Vignetting	Off
Light Shafts	On
Camera Lens Effect	On
Hairworks	Off
Number of background Characters	Medium
Shadow Quality	High
Terrain Quality	Ultra
Water Quality	Ultra
Foliage Visibility Range	High
Grass Density	Low
Texture Quality	Ultra
Detail Level	Ultra

Compatibility Layer : None

Quick Action Menu:

Use per-game profile	On
Framerate Limit	30
Refresh Rate	60
Allow Tearing	On
Half Rate Shading	Off
Thermal Power (TDP) Limit	Off
Manual GPU Clock	Off

 

Golden 40

In-game:

Launcher

DirectX 11

Display

Display Mode	Fullscreen
Vsync	Off
Resolution	1280x800
Maximum FPS	Unlimited

Graphics

Anti-Aliasing	TAAU
Sharpening	Low
Screen Space Ambient Occlusion	SSAO
Screen Space Reflections	Low
Motion Blur	Off
Blur	On
Bloom	On
Depth of Field	On
Chromatic Aberration	Off
Vignetting	Off
Light Shafts	On
Camera Lens Effect	On
Hairworks	Off
Number of background Characters	Low
Shadow Quality	Medium
Terrain Quality	High
Water Quality	High
Foliage Visibility Range	Low
Grass Density	Low
Texture Quality	High
Detail Level	Medium

Compatibility Layer: None

Quick Action Menu

Frame Rate Limit	40
Refresh Rate	40
Allow Tearing	On
Half Rate Shading	Off
Thermal Power (TDP) Limit	Off
Manual GPU Clock	Off