The Witcher 3 next-gen received its first hotfix on PC yesterday, promising to improve the game's performance and stability. Detailed patch notes haven't been shared, but some comparison videos shared online do confirm that something has indeed improved, although performance is still far from optimal.

　　The comparison videos shared by BilkRok, MxBenchmarkPC, and Benchmark Central show how the hotfix mainly improved frame times, resulting in fewer performance spikes and slightly better stability, no matter the system configuration.

　　While performance is still not quite there, it's still good to see CD Projekt Red rolling out the first fix for The Witcher 3 next-gen. NVIDIA RTX GPUs owners can also get slightly improved performance and visuals with the unofficial DLSS update, which brings NVIDIA's upscaling technology up to the latest version, 2.5.0.

　　The Witcher 3 is now available on PC, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch worldwide. You can learn more about the next-gen patch and the issues found in the PC release by checking out Alessio's hands-on.

　　The free The Witcher 3 Next-Gen update is finally here, at last, featuring a host of quality-of-life and gameplay improvements in addition to all the technical enhancements. On PC, players can enjoy a brand new Ultra+ graphics preset. Then, on top of that, they can enable four ray traced effects: global illumination, ambient occlusion, shadows and reflections, with the latter two unavailable on consoles.

　　With everything turned on, the game looks absolutely fantastic. Granted, it had a great base to begin with, but the textures are clearly higher quality here (partly thanks to the integrated mods), and the draw distance is massively improved, just like the accuracy and sharpness of reflections and shadows. The star of the show is the ray traced global illumination, though, which elevates the game's lighting to new heights.