The Witcher 3 Remastered PC Version Criticized Over AMD Graphics Card Issues

On September 29, CD Projekt Red released The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered, a free upgrade for all owners of the game. However, the PC launch didn't go as smoothly as fans had hoped. Negative reviews on Steam spiked sharply, and most of the complaints concern AMD graphics cards.

Radeon owners, especially those with the RX 9070 XT and RX 9060 XT, are reporting serious graphical glitches. Trees and forests fail to load, black artifacts spread across the screen, river water flickers noticeably, and foliage appears with inverted colors. One player with an RX 9070 XT summed up the situation briefly: "remaster is strictly unplayable on AMD graphics". He also said he saw black artifacts around fires, flickering water, and missing textures within the first five minutes of gameplay.

The problem with player and critic reviews is that players didn't get the fix. Reviewers didn't run into these issues and rated the game highly because they received a special pre-release driver from AMD. The current Adrenalin 26.9.1 driver essentially didn't work with the remaster. CD Projekt Red warned about this on its support account before release, noting that the recommended driver hadn't been released yet.The good news is that AMD released the Adrenalin 26.9.2 driver on the same day, September 29. Radeon owners are advised to update before launching the game. It's not yet clear whether all the issues are gone, and neither AMD nor CD Projekt Red has commented on the situation separately. Interestingly, the game runs without these glitches on Linux and Steam Deck.

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AMD owners aren't the only ones complaining, as owners of powerful NVIDIA graphics cards have issues too. A player with an RTX 4090 noted that performance in the game is the same with and without path tracing, and that a stable 60 FPS is only possible with frame generation:" No amount of cutting edge hardware can brute force bad optimization and this release is the perfect example of it". Still, even he admitted that it's hard to criticize the developers too much for a free upgrade.

Despite the criticism, The Witcher 3 Remastered has already broken its own Steam record, with more than 120,000 concurrent players, while the original version in 2015 didn't even reach 100,000. The remaster features improved lighting, a redesigned interface, a photo mode, and more than 70 individual fixes.