Witcher 3 getting a Free Ray Tracing update from CDPR.

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Snowdog

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My favorite game developer does again, blowing my expectations. They are doing a Visual Upgrade (including Ray Tracing) for next generation consoles and PC.

Free for current owners:

https://thewitcher.com/en/news/32792/the-witcher-3-wild-hunt-is-coming-to-the-next-generation

We’re working on the next generation edition of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt!

Developed to take advantage of the most powerful gaming hardware, the next-gen edition of the game will feature a range of visual and technical improvements — including ray tracing and faster loading times — across the base game, both expansions, and all extra content.

The next generation edition of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt will release as a standalone purchase for PC, Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, as well as a free update for everyone who already owns the game on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4.

ewitcher.com_en_1599209789_5f52013e05d041.93281150.jpg
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Ray Tracing is obviously taking off in a big way, and man does CDPR deliver value after the purchase.
 
Wow, that's pretty awesome, but what about DLSS support too? I've never seen a game support one RTX without DLSS, just the other way around. I picked up the whole series several month ago on Steam on a sale and have yet to play them yet.
 
T4rd said:
Wow, that's pretty awesome, but what about DLSS support too? I've never seen a game support one RTX without DLSS, just the other way around. I picked up the whole series several month ago on Steam on a sale and have yet to play them yet.
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you are probably getting rtx because consoles are going to have it. Not many developers are going to go out of their way to do dlss first. If it comes it will be later than sooner.
 
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NKD said:
getting rtx because consoles are going to have it
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The consoles don't have RTX, because that's an Nvidia technology, just like they don't have DLSS.

And as cool as RT for TW3 is, if it doesn't come with DLSS, it had better be extremely well optimized!
 
NKD said:
you are probably getting rtx because consoles are going to have it. Not many developers are going to go out of their way to do dlss first. If it comes it will be later than sooner.
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I wonder if it will even be RTX then on PC and not some software/engine or hardware agnostic version of ray tracing like the consoles will be using.
 
T4rd said:
I wonder if it will even be RTX then on PC and not some software/engine or hardware agnostic version of ray tracing like the consoles will be using.
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The Pc version of Ray Tracing is hardware agnostic. It's done DirectX12 and Vulkan. In fact the Xbox series X is using the same Ray Tracing that's on the PC, it's the exact same version of DX12 Utimate.
 
LazyGamer said:
The consoles don't have RTX, because that's an Nvidia technology, just like they don't have DLSS.

And as cool as RT for TW3 is, if it doesn't come with DLSS, it had better be extremely well optimized!
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Microsoft would like a word with you about their DX12 DXR API...
 
reaper12 said:
The Pc version of Ray Tracing is hardware agnostic. It's done DirectX12 and Vulkan. In fact the Xbox series X is using the same Ray Tracing that's on the PC, it's the exact same version of DX12 Utimate.
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Interesting. I think this will be the first game on PC with non-RTX ray tracing then, right? I think I remember reading that the DX12/Vulcan ray tracing can still leverage the tensor cores on the RTX GPUs though in order to give them a hardware advantage for ray tracing still. Is that true?
 
reaper12 said:
The Pc version of Ray Tracing is hardware agnostic. It's done DirectX12 and Vulkan. In fact the Xbox series X is using the same Ray Tracing that's on the PC, it's the exact same version of DX12 Utimate.
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Sort of. Vulkan version so far last I checked was a NVidia extension. Khronos were going to use that as a template for generic RT. Not sure what the current state of that is. It's probably waiting on AMD HW for one thing.
 
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Snowdog said:
Nope. I thank CDPR, for consistently being one of the most stand up game developers.
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I am not knocking on the developer. Yes they did it before hand knowing the time was right. Nothing against that.
 
T4rd said:
Interesting. I think this will be the first game on PC with non-RTX ray tracing then, right? I think I remember reading that the DX12/Vulcan ray tracing can still leverage the tensor cores on the RTX GPUs though in order to give them a hardware advantage for ray tracing still. Is that true?
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RTX RT is a toolkit that uses DXR. It basically makes RT easy for developers. Whether AMD or nVidia there will be specific ways to program to utilize the hardware most efficiently. It’s up to AMD and nVidia to make this as simple as possible via toolkits. Engine designers will have their own as well (already optimized for the engine.)
 
LazyGamer said:
That supports DLSS?
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Those are not related.
DXR is Microsoft. API in DX12. used by NVIDIA to run raytracing via. specialised NVIDIA hardware.
DLSS is NVIDIA. Deep Learning algorithm running via CUDA on specialised NVIDIA hardware.

You need to seperate entities.

Because DXR is Microsoft, it is also part of their new Xbox.

So what was your complaint again?
 
Factum said:
Those are not related.
DXR is Microsoft. API in DX12. used by NVIDIA to run raytracing via. specialised NVIDIA hardware.
DLSS is NVIDIA. Deep Learning algorithm running via CUDA on specialised NVIDIA hardware.

You need to seperate entities.

Because DXR is Microsoft, it is also part of their new Xbox.

So what was your complaint again?
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None of what you are saying is answering the question that was stated "Will it support DLSS?"

But I assume it will...
 
LazyGamer said:
That if CDPR isn't supporting RTX in TW3, that they may not be supporting DLSS either, like I said up in #5?
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Too soon to tell.

DLSS hooks into the engine like TAA does, so has nothing to do with how game effects are programmed (RTX effects are typically programmed via DXR in DX12 games).

It also has extremely high Reward/Effort ratio. In that it doesn't take much more work than implementing TAA, and can boost performance up to 2X, with little loss in visual quality.

So it's easy to implement, independents of effects programming, gives great bang/buck.

I expect AMD will create some kind of answer to what is now a very compelling DLSS story, and CDPR, may later announce support for both scaling technologies in Witcher 3.
 
Snowdog said:
Nope. I thank CDPR, for consistently being one of the most stand up game developers.
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Yes releasing buggy games at launch and downgraded from there e3 presentation. Seems like the standard Triple A game these days. :p

Hopefully these cyberpunk delays help them polish the game.
 
Looking forward to it, Witcher 3 is one of my fave games and it doesn't take much to convince me another playthrough is warranted.

What would be great, is if they use this update to also make cross save possible between PC and PS5/XSX. They have it available on the Switch version, so hopefully they'll bake it in to the next gen ports too.
 
That's great news. I've been playing TW3 as a slow burn for a while. Got about 120 hours in, and nowhere near beating the main game. The world and side quests are too fun.

Some of the texture mods make a big difference in the look of TW3. Wonder if CDPR is planning on updating the textures.
 
If this is actually an engine upgrade, I hope it gets around the thread limitation the base game has. This seems highly likely considering they mentioned "faster load times" and I'd assume that DX12 ultimate is multi-threaded like crazy.

I finished my playthrough a month ago or so, but I didn't 100% everything, so ray tracing and an engine update would probably be enough for me to get back into it and finish up my last few quests. That and the final Witcher HD Reworked texture update.
 
Well, if the 30xx cards are as fast as they say, we don't necessarily need DLSS for RT to be usable. Even a 'lowly' (lol) 2080 gets over 100 FPS at 1440p right now without RT.
 
Insomniator said:
Well, if the 30xx cards are as fast as they say, we don't necessarily need DLSS for RT to be usable. Even a 'lowly' (lol) 2080 gets over 100 FPS at 1440p right now without RT.
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Usable, probably not, but the main gripe with RT is that the impact is pretty substantial and most of us would prefer it to be next to none.
 
Regardless of whether it was easy or not, they didn't have to do this especially as a free update. Even if it's not a lot of work they still have to pay people to do this for a game that probably isn't going to sell that many more copies on PC at this point. Definitely not for a large price either.

So....they are doing this just to support their community. Wow. I'm impressed.
 
LazyGamer said:
Usable, probably not, but the main gripe with RT is that the impact is pretty substantial and most of us would prefer it to be next to none.
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Completely depends what they use RT for. Global illumination is only 10% iirc. Ray traced diffuse lighting is 20%, ect.

Also... the new cards will have tons of extra fps to burn ;)
 
Dion said:
Yes releasing buggy games at launch and downgraded from there e3 presentation. Seems like the standard Triple A game these days. :p

Hopefully these cyberpunk delays help them polish the game.
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What? You must be confusing then with Bethesda garbage. TW3 wasn't perfect but was pretty damn good on release.
 
MangoSeed said:
I would prefer it if 4K or MSAA had no performance impact too.
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Gottem!

I don't think devs should bother with RTX unless they're also doing DLSS 2.0 - the latter is that crucial.

Since Raytracing is a big buzz word now, seems like we'll continue to see hybridized implementations of it claiming "agnostic" and "no special hardware needed" (Crytek's stuff for example), and even consoles claiming "Raytracing" when the feature levels each are doing are drastically decreased from more full fat hardware accelerated RTX like in Control.

I guess it'll be like the Raytracing equivalent of using checkerboarding and other hacks to achieve "4K" on consoles.

None of that's a criticism though - momentum and interest gains for Raytracing benefits the entire space.
 
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vegeta535 said:
What? You must be confusing then with Bethesda garbage. TW3 wasn't perfect but was pretty damn good on release.
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Yeah, I don't remember it being too buggy but there was a pretty hefty visual downgrade in the Global Illumination and general lighting design. Maybe we'll finally get to play with those e3 visuals since there is much more powerful hardware now.
 
odditory said:
Since Raytracing is a big buzz word now, seems like we'll continue to see hybridized implementations of it claiming "agnostic" and "no special hardware needed" (Crytek's stuff for example), and even consoles claiming "Raytracing" when the feature levels each are doing are drastically decreased from more full fat hardware accelerated RTX like in Control.
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Yeah Crytek's raytracing is mostly cone tracing into voxels, which isn't quite raytracing but is a huge step up from screen space techniques. We would get a nice bump in IQ if everyone adopted SVOGI without going full hog on triangle raytracing.
 
I'm not surprised at this, as it is a perfect time to promote the upcoming Cyberpunk with a free update. The RT is probably funded by Nvidia, but the rest of the HD update is coming to everyone.

Borderlands 3 did the same thing last year, and it primed the pumps pretty well (over 10 million sales in the first year)
 
What's the chances of them using the Netflix show character likeness in the updated? Can they legally do that?
 
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