CDPR has officially released The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Complete Edition. This re-release is very generous; not only can existing players upgrade for free, but the graphics technology has been brought up to 2026 standards, including ray tracing and path tracing.
I've read quite a few performance reviews, and most people focus on GPU performance. However, tests from TechSpot and PCGH have also revealed CPU bottlenecks, which are related to the game's ray tracing. Performance drops significantly when path tracing is enabled.
PCGH's tests used the Core i9-12900K and compared three scenarios: no ray tracing, RTX ray tracing, and path tracing. In the latter two cases, game performance dropped significantly. With path tracing enabled, the average frame rate with the 12900K paired with an RTX 5090 was only 45.9 fps.
In TechSpot's tests, even at 1080p resolution, enabling path tracing causes GPUs starting from the RTX 5070 Ti to hit a bottleneck, with performance hovering around 60 fps. Even top-tier cards cannot achieve significantly better results.
Given this performance, there isn't much that can be done for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Complete Edition right now. You can either enable path tracing and accept lower frame rates (since 60 fps is still playable), or simply disable path tracing, as the visual improvement isn't that significant.
However, as path tracing becomes more widespread, the impact of high-performance CPUs on gaming will become increasingly important. AMD and Intel's next-generation Ryzen and Core processors will see significant improvements in core count, architecture, and cache, which will be a strong selling point.