The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered reached 120,975 concurrent players on Steam on 29 September, setting a new all-time record for CD PROJEKT RED’s RPG more than 11 years after its original release.
The free upgrade arrives with a much broader set of changes than a conventional visual remaster. CDPR has reworked combat, progression, movement and parts of REDengine 3, while the PC version adds full path tracing and current-generation upscaling and frame-generation technologies.
The Witcher 3 Remastered at a Glance
| Category | Remastered |
|---|---|
| Steam all-time peak | 120,975 concurrent players |
| Release date | 29 September 2026 |
| Upgrade | Free for eligible existing owners |
| Platforms | PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch 2 |
| Included expansions | Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine |
| Major PC addition | Full path tracing |
CDPR also brought the game to Battle.net and added Xbox Play Anywhere support. Existing owners on supported platforms receive the Remastered upgrade without buying the game again, and original Nintendo Switch owners can move to the native Switch 2 version.
The Witcher 3 Sets a New Steam Record
SteamDB recorded 120,975 concurrent players on 29 September. The previous all-time peak stood at 103,329, meaning the Remastered launch pushed the record higher by 17,646 players, or roughly 17%.
| Steam peak | Concurrent players |
|---|---|
| Previous all-time peak | 103,329 |
| Remastered launch | 120,975 |
| Difference | +17,646 |
Steam concurrency is not the same as total player count. GOG, Epic Games Store, Battle.net and the console versions sit outside that measurement. The useful signal here is that Remastered produced the strongest simultaneous Steam activity The Witcher 3 has seen since launch.
The scale of the returning audience matters. The Witcher 3 has sold more than 65 million copies, so CDPR is working with an unusually large installed base for an 11-year-old single-player game. A free upgrade can reach players who already own it rather than depending entirely on new sales.
CDPR Reworked Gameplay Alongside the Visual Upgrade
The Remastered changes go well beyond textures and lighting. Geralt has revised movement and combat animations, additional finishers and changes to exploration movement. Non-boss monsters have received combat adjustments, while new camera options change how exploration and fights can be framed.
Progression has also been rebuilt. Skills are arranged in a more conventional tree with prerequisites and three ranks per skill, while values, effects and synergies have been rebalanced. Existing skill points are reset when moving to Remastered so players can rebuild Geralt around the revised system.
“When you look at the gameplay side, it was obvious that this was almost the weakest side.”
CDPR designer Paweł Sasko used that description while discussing why the studio revisited gameplay instead of limiting Remastered to presentation. He also said lessons from the Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 redesign informed the new progression work, especially the push toward more meaningful choices instead of stacking passive bonuses.
| Area | What changed |
|---|---|
| Combat | Revised movement, animations, finishers and monster behavior |
| Progression | Reworked skill tree, prerequisites, three ranks and balance changes |
| Rendering | Updated shading, lighting, foliage, terrain and materials |
| PC renderer | Native DirectX 12 with multithreading |
| Ray tracing | Full path tracing plus additional ray-traced effects |
| Quality of life | Camera, interface and gameplay-option improvements |
REDengine 3 Gets a Much Newer PC Rendering Stack
On PC, the technical upgrade is substantial. CDPR has implemented a revised shading model, updated materials and terrain rendering, improved foliage lighting, new image-based lighting, GTAO, ray-traced local shadows and updated tone mapping. Assets derived from the community-made HD Reworked Project are also part of the new presentation.
The PC version supports several technologies that did not exist when The Witcher 3 launched in 2015:
- full path tracing;
- DLSS 4.5 with Ray Reconstruction;
- AMD FSR 4 with Frame Generation and Anti-Lag 2;
- Intel XeSS 2.0 with Frame Generation and Low Latency;
- ray-traced lighting and shading for HairWorks.
The native DirectX 12 renderer now uses multithreading, which matters even for players who leave ray tracing disabled. It gives CDPR room to modernize the rendering path itself rather than simply layering new effects over the older Classic build.
Early GPU Tests Show Better Raster Performance but Heavy Path Tracing
Independent testing gives the PC changes some useful context. TechSpot tested 13 current GPUs in Novigrad with a Ryzen 7 9800X3D and found several cases where Remastered ran faster than the Classic version at conventional rasterized settings.
At native 1440p Medium, the Arc B580 averaged about 102 fps and the Radeon RX 9060 XT 8GB reached about 121 fps in that test. At 4K Medium, TechSpot measured the RTX 5070 Ti around 36% faster than Classic and the RX 9070 XT around 45% faster.
The more interesting result is that Remastered can add visual changes while also improving parts of the rendering pipeline. The multithreaded DX12 work is therefore relevant to ordinary raster performance, not only to the path-tracing preset.
Path tracing changes the picture. In TechSpot’s Novigrad test, the RTX 5090 struggled to move much beyond roughly 60 fps and remained unusually close to the RTX 5080. Moving outside the city raised the apparent ceiling to around 80 fps, but the two cards still scaled less than expected.
The Ryzen 7 9800X3D did not show the utilization pattern of an obvious conventional CPU bottleneck. That is not enough evidence to call the behavior a REDengine limitation, however. Drivers, patches or another part of the rendering workload could still alter the result.
Radeon results also need launch-day context. Early testing exposed serious rendering problems with the older public Adrenalin 26.9.1 driver, while AMD released 26.9.2 on 29 September with official support for The Witcher 3 Remastered. The older-driver reports therefore should not be treated as a permanent description of Radeon support.
Remastered Now Becomes the Base for Songs of the Past
The timing also matters because CDPR is not finished with The Witcher 3. Songs of the Past, the new expansion planned for 2027, will arrive after Remastered rather than on top of the unchanged 2015-era game.
Sasko said the revised character builds were considered across the base game, Hearts of Stone, Blood and Wine and Songs of the Past. That gives the gameplay overhaul a purpose beyond another playthrough: the next expansion inherits the new progression and combat foundation.
GameTechReport’s earlier Songs of the Past coverage goes deeper into Letten, the expansion’s story setup and its additional combat options.
That also puts Remastered into a wider CDPR roadmap: Songs of the Past follows in 2027, while The Witcher 4 is currently targeting 2028 with Ciri leading the next mainline saga.
The Steam record is the immediate launch result. The more durable change is that CDPR now has a substantially modernized version of The Witcher 3 to build on next: revised progression, altered combat, a newer renderer and a much broader PC feature set.
That makes Remastered different from a simple anniversary graphics patch. It gives existing owners a reason to return now, while changing the version of The Witcher 3 that CDPR will carry into 2027.
Sources: CD PROJEKT RED — launch; The Witcher — official changes; SteamDB.