CD Projekt RED has just released a new update for The Witcher 3 Next-Gen. According to the changelog, Patch 4.01 adds a new performance mode for ray-traced global illumination. This mode will improve frame rate by prioritizing performance over range and precision.
Furthermore, this update fixes an issue where the Screen Space Reflections setting wasn’t working on PC. Not only that, but it packs numerous bug fixes.
For those wondering, this patch does not bring any CPU optimizations. As such, the game still relies heavily on one CPU core/thread.
As always, Steam and GOG Galaxy will download this patch the moment you launch their clients. Patch 4.01 is around 3GB in size on GOG Galaxy. Below you can also find its complete changelog.
The Witcher 3 Next-Gen Update 4.01 Release Notes
PC-SPECIFIC
- Fixed an issue where the Screen Space Reflections setting wasn’t working on PC despite being turned on. Players who had previously set their SSR setting to high may notice a performance impact.
- Added a new performance mode for ray-traced global illumination, which can be toggled by players with compatible hardware. It improves frame rate by prioritizing performance over range and precision.
QUESTS & GAMEPLAY – Available on all platforms
- Battle Preparations – Fixed an issue where it could be impossible to interact with Avallac’h during the objective “Let Avallac’h know everything’s ready.”
- Family Matters – Fixed an issue that could cause the game to crash during the transition to Ciri’s Story: Out of the Shadows when speaking to the Bloody Baron.
- King’s Gambit – Fixed an issue where it could be impossible to participate in the fistfight with the second Vildkaarl due to an invisible obstacle.
- Wine Wars: Belgaard – Added a retrofix for the issue we fixed in 4.00, where the quest couldn’t be completed if the player destroyed one of the required monster nests during exploration.
- A Dangerous Game – The armor in Caesar’s room should now change its appearance when the Alternate Nilfgaardian Armor is turned on.
- Axii Puppet – Increased the health and damage dealt by the puppet.
- Adrenaline Rush mutation should now work according to its description.
- Various small fixes to quests and cutscenes.
LOCALIZATION – Available on all platforms
- Fixed various issues with Arabic localization.
- Added the localized versions of Orianna’s song “Lullaby of Woe” in Korean and Simplified Chinese.
- Adjusted Priscilla’s lip-sync animation to match her voice-over in Simplified Chinese during the song “The Wolven Storm”.
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Most of the veterans have left and a proprietary engine is possibly too hard for their newer Western diversity hires to understand. Hence switching over to industry mainstream engine, Unreal, for newer games.
what does this mean: too hard for their newer Western diversity hires to understand ?
it mean their new developers aren’t sh*t but even if they are it will
take them sometime to figure everything out if ever like in every other
software development project in the world because the company will make them move
on to something else sooner or latter and there is no one to point them into the right direction
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/4bb67180c98aa6816e063c7a264a314d43e3109d64890be955b4fd126a8da3f5.jpg They’re a Polish company, so they’re in Eastern Europe. After Witcher 3 released, they started hiring more foreigners from Western world countries. They’re also depending on woke ESG investment funds like Blackrock/Vanguard to bankroll their slate of newer games, in the wake of the reputation loss from the Cyberpunk 2077 launch disaster. To qualify for ESG funds you have to meet staff diversity quotas. To pad their numbers, corpos needing to meet diversity quotas will often hire people with the bare minimum qualifications, just as long as they have a cosmetic identity. Hence “talentless diversity hires”.
You completely ignore the FACT that the update was originally done by a bunch of white male Russians who completely botched it and left CDPR a steaming pile of garbage to work with after a year and a half
Actually, and I swear I’m not racist or anything, the studio that was working on it initially is known for their Vulkan prowess. So yeah, if they had done the work it would probably be much better
What’s your source that Saber “botched it”? Right now I’m assuming it’s your ar*e. Saber weren’t allowed to finish the job because CDPR wanted to virtue signal over the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
They’re a Polish company, so they’re in Eastern Europe. After Witcher 3 released, they started hiring more foreigners from Western world countries. They’re also depending on woke ESG investment funds like Blackrock/Vanguard to bankroll their slate of newer games, in the wake of the reputation loss from the Cyberpunk 2077 launch disaster. To qualify for ESG funds you have meet staff diversity quotas. To pad their numbers, corpos needing to meet diversity quotas will often hire people with the bare minimum qualifications, just as long as they have a cosmetic identity. Hence “talentless diversity hires”.
It means he is a racist misogynist that believes only lily White straight males are capable of understanding computers, science, and technology. Never mind that the original developers of the update where white Russian males that didn’t do jack sh*t in the year they were working on it and left CDPR a steaming pile of crap to work witrh
Best left ignored to wallow in their own misery
You must be new to this site. Everything is viewed through the lens of a culture war. Empiricism is completely ignored and incompetence due to race is automatically assumed (even though buggy releases have been a thing since the dawn of videogaming)
All you have is a strawman and ad hominem. We have an observable decline in game quality from TW3 to CP2077, what changed in that time? CDPR started towing the line to appeal to US industry standards, they started hiring more Western developers and there was an exodus of senior staff who had worked on TW trilogy. It could all be coincidence, but there more logical reasoning to my theory than your narrative of Saber being incompetent.
As I said in a different reply, you have provided no proof for your claim. The actual fact is that Saber weren’t allowed to finish the job because CDPR wanted to virtue signal over the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
Does this update do the same thing as the performance mod which reduces ray count? If so, this is pointless. I’d expect the actual devs to make something more effective than that mod.
If not, this is still a bandaid which doesn’t alter the underlying implementation.
entrepreneur, magazine
its stupid. It does the same as the mod we’ve had for a month and still drops like crazy when you go near a town because of the CPU bottleneck and STILL crashes every 5 minutes on dx12.
What. A. Joke.
Just curious, have you undervolted your CPU by any chance? I’m facing the same issues you are and wanted to see if the game was the common factor.
No
It’s a threading issue in the game engine core. CDPR hired outside developers from Russia who obviously conned them into believing they knew what they were doing when they did not.
You simply cannot use the same DX11 threading model for DX12, you have to rewrite the core of the game engine itself. The people who are capable of doing that are too busy right now working on Cyberpunk’s paid DLC which is why they farmed it out to a 3rd party in the first place
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URGF-cKo96k
Well I played around a bit with this updated patch, and I don’t think it did much. The performance setting helps claw some frames back. I saw similar performance gains to using that optimized RT ini file that was making the rounds a while back. CPU performance still sucks in DX12 sadly. With RT off, I managed to get 68fps minimum around Novigrad square with mostly high settings at 1080p with DLSS set to quality, while in the DX11 version the minimum I saw was around 92fps (same settings with HBAO mod but no DLSS). CDPR still has a lot of work to do.
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They added two “new swords”, that already existed in the game but unused.
That’s it, stick to Dx11 people.
Without fixing the CPU threading issue this is merely a band aid on an amputated limb but not at all surprising as I have warned people to not expect a proper fix until after they announce the release date of the Cyberpunk DLC so they can bring over the crew that made the Red Engine work in DX12 for Cyberpunk.
The problem is they got conned by a group of Russian developers who falsely claimed they could make the Red Engine work in DX12 when they OBVIOUSLY didn’t do a damned thing in the year plus they worked on the project before CDPR took it back. CDPR simply doesn’t have the available developers to work on both Cyberpunk and Witcher 3 at the same time and since the CP DLC is a paid expansion and a critical income source they aren’t going to pull them off to work on a free update.
ETA on the Cyberpunk DLC?
It hasn’t been announced yet so at least another month