The Witcher 3's Big New-Gen Update Is Broken, Causing Crashes And Performance Issues

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt's free new-gen update is finally here on both PC and consoles, but not everyone is having a good time with it. It seems that the PC version of the update is causing significant issues for players, including wobbly frame rates, strange HUD glitches, and outright crashes at times.

These problems seem to be affecting even those with powerful machines, with even RTX 3080 owners reporting sub-60fps frame rates in populated areas. The good news is that you can crank your game back to the "classic" 1.32 patch without much effort, at least until CD Projekt Red can iron out some of the bugs.

In order to do that on Steam, go to Properties, then Beta, and select the Classic beta branch from the menu. This will cause Steam to automatically update your Witcher 3 copy with the last-gen version, which is free of these new issues. If you want to stick with the new version, some Redditors suggest that turning off ray-tracing and other optional features will help with the frame-rate, but it seems that there's not much you can do about the stuttering in certain areas of the game.

CD Projekt Red is aware of the issue and said in a post on Twitter that the team is "actively investigating" the reports it receives and is working on an update already.

We are aware of the issues PC players have been reporting since last night's release of the update. We are actively investigating all of the reports and will be providing an update on particular issues as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience!
— The Witcher (@witchergame) December 14, 2022

In other Witcher news, this new-gen update added cross-saves and cross-progression to the game, which is a nice feature for those with living room and office gaming setups. We also wrote recently about Witcher 3's best side-quest.