The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered launched on 29 September at 10:00 UTC, and by the afternoon 119,852 people were playing it at once on Steam. That is the game's all-time record: the previous peak, 103,329, came in January 2020 when the Netflix series arrived. The update is free for every owner, and the Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine expansions are now free for everyone too.
The launch has been bumpy, though. Only 59 of the last hundred Steam reviews are positive, against 97 percent across the game's lifetime from almost 892,000 reviews. The biggest problem is on Radeon cards, and the fix is already out.
119,852 players: a record 11 years after launch
At launch in May 2015 the game peaked at 92,268 on Steam, and the next-gen update in December 2022 hit 89,259. The remaster beat them all before the evening peak in Europe and the Americas, so the number will probably still climb today. And that is Steam alone: the remaster also launched on PS5, Xbox Series and as a native Switch 2 version, and it is sold on GOG and Epic as well.
What the remaster changes
CD Projekt Red's changelog is very long. The highlights:
- Graphics. Native multithreaded DirectX 12, a new shading model, textures and models from the fan-made Witcher 3 HD Reworked Project, path tracing, ray-traced local shadows and ray-traced HairWorks.
- Upscalers. DLSS 4.5 with Ray Reconstruction, FSR 4 with frame generation and Anti-Lag 2 on Radeon RX 7000 and newer (older cards fall back to FSR 2), and XeSS 2.0 with frame generation. There is no DLSS 5; we cover that in a separate guide.
- Skills. Now a proper tree with three ranks per skill and prerequisites instead of flat point costs. Loading an old save resets your skill points, so you will have to spend them again.
- Combat and controls. New finishers, reworked behaviour for regular monsters, a wider exploration camera and a dynamic combat camera, a quick way out of combat, and looting straight from Roach.
- Interface. Meditation now shows a timelapse, nearby loot can be grouped into one window, there is a loot feed, more map markers and a much bigger photo mode.
- Mods. A built-in mod manager powered by mod.io, with mods on every platform. Older mods will most likely need updates.
There is also a Bard's Ballad accessibility preset for players who find it hard to concentrate, and Ukrainian text localization.
How it runs on PC: TechSpot's first test
TechSpot has already tested the remaster on a Ryzen 7 9800X3D in Novigrad, the most demanding part of the game. It came away with three findings.
One: at Medium the remaster looks clearly better than the original and still runs faster, by 45 to 58 percent at 4K. Two: Ultra and RT Ultra cost more, with the RTX 5070 Ti losing 23 percent against the old version at 1440p, while high-end GeForce cards hit an odd ceiling of about 94 fps with RT Ultra at 1080p and 1440p. Three: in TechSpot's view, path tracing more often looks worse than regular ray tracing, with overexposed faces and scenes drifting blue.
Cards with 8 GB of memory struggle. With RT Ultra at 1440p, the 16 GB RTX 5060 Ti gets 56 fps while the 8 GB model collapses to 32. The official requirements: at minimum a GTX 1660, RX 5500 XT 8 GB or Arc A580 with 6 GB of VRAM and 12 GB of RAM; recommended an RTX 2060 Super, RX 6600 XT or Arc B580 with 16 GB; Windows 11 and 60 GB on an SSD throughout. We looked at them in detail when CD Projekt updated the requirements.
Broken on Radeon: install driver 26.9.2
Most of the negative reviews come from Radeon owners. On Adrenalin 26.9.1, models disappear, up to whole forests, and shadows turn into black blocks. TechSpot says the game was effectively unplayable on that driver and tested AMD cards on a special pre-release build. CD Projekt Red's support team spent the morning telling players to wait for driver 26.9.2.
AMD released Adrenalin 26.9.2 the same day, 29 September, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered is on its list of newly supported games. If you are on Radeon, update the driver first and launch the game second. The other complaints in the reviews are about crashes, settings resetting and lower frame rates than the old version; at the time of writing CD Projekt had not shipped fixes for those.
Don't like the remaster? How to go back to Classic
The remaster installed itself for everyone, but the old version is still there, and CD Projekt Red calls it Classic. Here is how to go back:
- Steam. Library, right-click the game, Properties, Betas tab, pick CLASSIC. To return to the remaster, pick None there.
- GOG Galaxy. Manage installation, Configure, set Beta Channels to Classic and turn off auto-updates.
- Epic Games Store. No rollback; Epic only offers the latest version.
The remaster picks up old saves and achievements, but as mentioned, your skill points get reset. If you played with mods, those saves may not load. How the series went from a failed prototype to 60 million copies is in our history of the series.
Sources
CD Projekt Red on Steam: launch announcement of 29.09.2026 and the full changelog of 28.09.2026. Steam store page: requirements and reviews as of 29.09.2026. SteamCharts, player peaks. TechSpot GPU benchmark, 29.09.2026. AMD Adrenalin 26.9.2 release notes. CD Projekt Red support on reverting to the old version. PC Guide on the AMD problems. Screenshots from the official Steam gallery.
