Witcher 3 Remastered Path Tracing Tested on AMD GPUs: 4K Is Brutal

A new AMD-focused benchmark of The Witcher 3 Remastered tests Radeon RX 9000 and RX 7000 cards across 4K, 2K and 1080p with full path tracing, and 4K proves a serious challenge.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has been getting visual upgrades for over a decade now, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered is pushing things even further with path tracing. The new tech improves indoor lighting, scene reflections and indirect illumination across that familiar continent — but as you'd expect, it also cranks up the hardware demands. Earlier GPU testing already showed just how heavy full path tracing can be.

This time the spotlight is on AMD. The test rounds up a bunch of Sapphire Radeon cards from the RX 9000 and RX 7000 series, spanning performance tiers from the RX 9070 XT all the way down to the RX 7650 GRE. The Remastered edition natively supports FSR4 upscaling, and RX 7000 series cards can use it too. But the real question is how these different AMD tiers actually perform under max settings with path tracing fully enabled — and how much frame generation can help.

To find out, the benchmarks run across three resolutions: 4K, 2K and 1080p. That spread should give a clear picture of where each card lands, from the top-end RX 9070 XT down through the more budget-friendly options.

The headline from the source is blunt: at 4K with path tracing on, AMD's lineup gets wiped out. That's the toughest possible workload — max quality plus full path tracing — and it's the scenario where frame generation matters most if you're trying to claw back playable frame rates.

It's worth keeping in mind that this is a remaster of a 2015 game, and path tracing is still a next-gen-level feature. Seeing modern AMD cards struggle at 4K isn't shocking, but it does show how steep the cost of maxing out this classic really is. The lower resolutions should tell a more encouraging story for mid-range Radeon owners.

If you're running a Radeon GPU and wondering whether The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered is worth maxing out, the resolution you play at is going to matter a lot. FSR4 and frame generation are there to help, but 4K path tracing remains a brutal ask.

What GPU are you running, and would you rather dial back path tracing or drop to 2K to keep the frame rates up? Let us know in the comments.