The Witcher 3 Remastered GPU Benchmark: RTX 5090 to Arc B580

The Witcher 3 Remastered GPU Benchmark: RTX 5090 to Arc B580

TechSpot’s initial GPU testing of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered reveals an unusual performance profile across modern graphics cards.

The free update introduces upgraded lighting, assets, ray tracing, and path tracing while retaining the underlying REDengine 3 technology. TechSpot tested 14 GPUs, ranging from the flagship GeForce RTX 5090 to the Intel Arc B580, across multiple resolutions and rendering modes.

The results expose several interesting characteristics of the updated engine: surprisingly strong rasterization performance at Medium settings, unusual frame-rate ceilings in some scenarios, substantial differences between NVIDIA and AMD scaling, and severe VRAM capacity limitations at higher resolutions with ray tracing and path tracing.

🎨 Visual Changes and Path Tracing

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The Remastered edition improves several aspects of the original game’s presentation, although the visual differences vary considerably depending on the rendering mode.

Vegetation and environmental detail are improved, while many scenes appear brighter overall. The changes are noticeable, but they do not represent a complete visual transformation of the original game.

Standard Ray Tracing

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Standard ray tracing provides a relatively balanced visual upgrade.

It improves lighting and reflections without introducing the extreme performance requirements associated with full path tracing. For many systems, it represents a more practical compromise between image quality and frame rate.

Path Tracing

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Path tracing produces a substantially heavier workload, but the visual improvements are less consistent.

TechSpot observed scenes where path tracing could produce:

• Excessive exposure
• Flatter-looking facial textures
• Bluish color shifts
• Inconsistent visual improvements compared with standard RT

The result is that path tracing is not simply a higher-quality version of standard ray tracing. Its image-quality characteristics vary by scene, while its computational cost is substantially higher.

🧪 Test Platform and Driver Conditions

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TechSpot performed testing in Novigrad, one of the most demanding areas of the game for both CPU and GPU workloads.

The test system used:

• AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
• 32GB DDR5-6000
• Multiple modern NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel GPUs

AMD cards were tested using a pre-release driver, version 26.20.15.02, because TechSpot encountered rendering issues with the public Adrenalin 26.9.1 driver.

That detail is important when interpreting the results: driver maturity can influence both performance and rendering correctness, particularly in a newly updated game.

⚡ Remastered vs. Classic Performance

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One of the most surprising findings is that the Remastered edition can actually deliver higher frame rates than the Classic version at Medium settings.

At Medium quality, TechSpot measured approximately 45% to 58% higher performance in the Remastered release while also observing improved visual quality.

At 4K, for example:

• RTX 5070 Ti was approximately 36% faster
• RX 9070 XT was approximately 45% faster

than their respective results in the Classic version under the tested conditions.

The behavior changes substantially at higher quality presets.

Ultra Preset

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At 1080p Ultra, the RTX 5070 Ti was approximately 7% slower in the Remastered version.

At 1440p, the RX 9070 XT experienced a smaller performance reduction than the RTX 5070 Ti:

• RX 9070 XT: approximately 10% lower
• RTX 5070 Ti: approximately 23% lower

Under those conditions, the RX 9070 XT was approximately 16% faster than the RTX 5070 Ti.

RT Ultra

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The performance relationship changes again when ray tracing is enabled.

At 1080p RT Ultra, the RX 9070 XT and RTX 5070 Ti both averaged roughly 93–94 FPS in the tested scenario.

This effectively eliminates the performance lead normally associated with the GeForce card in comparable workloads.

🖥️ 1080p GPU Performance

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At 1080p rasterized rendering, the game begins to expose system and engine limitations rather than purely GPU limitations.

The RTX 5090 averaged approximately 183 FPS, only around 6% ahead of the RTX 5080.

This is an unusually small difference considering the substantial hardware difference between the two GPUs.

Other results showed relatively close positioning across the midrange:

• RX 9070 GRE approximately matched the RTX 5070
• RTX 5060 Ti and RX 9060 XT were close
• RTX 5060 and Arc B580 both reached approximately 80 FPS

The results suggest that at 1080p, particularly in demanding sections of Novigrad, the engine or surrounding system can prevent high-end GPUs from scaling proportionally.

1080p RT Ultra

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Ray tracing reveals another unusual limitation.

The fastest GeForce cards and RX 9070 XT encounter a performance ceiling around 94 FPS in the tested Novigrad scenario.

That means adding substantially more GPU resources does not necessarily produce a proportional increase in frame rate.

1080p Path Tracing

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Path tracing exposes an even more pronounced ceiling.

With quality upscaling enabled:

The three high-end GeForce cards clustering around 62 FPS is particularly unusual.

Instead of GPU performance determining the result normally, the workload appears to encounter another bottleneck in the engine or rendering pipeline.

🖥️ 1440p Scaling

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Moving to 1440p reduces some of the system-level limitations seen at 1080p.

In rasterization, the RTX 5090 becomes approximately 42% faster than the RTX 5080, demonstrating that the flagship GPU can separate itself more effectively once the workload becomes sufficiently GPU-bound.

The RX 9070 XT also maintains a strong position, running approximately 16% faster than the RTX 5070 Ti in the tested rasterized configuration.

Path tracing remains considerably more demanding.

With Balanced upscaling:

• RTX 5090: approximately 59 FPS
• RTX 5080: approximately 59 FPS
• RX 9070 XT: approximately 34 FPS
• RTX 5060 Ti 16GB: approximately 34 FPS

The identical RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 result again indicates that the workload can encounter a ceiling before the additional GPU resources of the flagship card become useful.

🎮 4K Performance

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At 4K Ultra without upscaling, the workload finally becomes sufficiently demanding to distinguish the highest-end GPUs.

The RTX 5090 reached approximately 107 FPS, compared with:

• RTX 5080: substantially lower
• RTX 5070 Ti: substantially lower
• Other tested GPUs: generally below 60 FPS

According to the tested results, the RTX 5090 was approximately 62% faster than the RTX 5080 and 75% faster than the RTX 5070 Ti in this configuration.

This is much closer to the scaling expected from a heavily GPU-bound workload.

4K Path Tracing

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With Performance upscaling enabled, the path-traced workload produced:

The artificial ceiling observed at lower resolutions largely disappears.

This suggests that at 4K, the GPUs become sufficiently saturated that raw compute and rendering throughput play a larger role in determining performance.

🧠 VRAM Becomes a Major Constraint

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One of the most important findings is the effect of VRAM capacity.

At 1440p and especially 4K, enabling ray tracing or path tracing can push 8GB graphics cards beyond their practical memory capacity.

The difference between the two RTX 5060 Ti configurations illustrates the problem particularly clearly.

Under 4K RT Ultra with Performance upscaling:

• RTX 5060 Ti 16GB: approximately 37 FPS
• RTX 5060 Ti 8GB: approximately 13 FPS

The 8GB model therefore suffers a dramatic performance collapse rather than a modest reduction.

This is an important distinction: once a workload exceeds available VRAM, performance can become dominated by memory-management overhead and data transfers rather than the GPU’s raw shader throughput.

More demanding settings
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Higher texture / RT data requirements
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VRAM capacity exceeded
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Memory pressure
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Severe performance degradation

For modern games using advanced lighting techniques, VRAM capacity can therefore become a more important specification than conventional GPU-tier comparisons suggest.

🚧 Unusual Frame-Rate Ceilings

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The benchmark also exposes several apparent frame-rate ceilings.

At 1080p Medium in Novigrad, high-end GPUs reportedly encounter approximate limits around:

• NVIDIA: 194–198 FPS
• AMD: 147–149 FPS

Path tracing introduces another ceiling around 60–62 FPS for some high-end GeForce cards.

Interestingly, moving outside Novigrad can raise the path-tracing ceiling to approximately 80 FPS.

Yet even outside the most demanding city scenes, the RTX 5090 does not always separate cleanly from the RTX 5080.

These results suggest that the observed limits are not simply GPU hardware limitations. Possible contributors include CPU workload, engine scheduling, rendering dependencies, synchronization, or other software-side constraints.

Without source-code or engine-level profiling, however, the exact cause of each ceiling cannot be established from benchmark results alone.

📊 What the Benchmark Reveals

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The results can be summarized across three different workload regimes:

This makes The Witcher 3 Remastered an unusually interesting benchmark because simply moving from one GPU tier to another does not guarantee proportional performance gains.

Resolution, rendering mode, VRAM capacity, and the specific game scene can all change the performance hierarchy.

🧠 Conclusion

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TechSpot’s The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered testing reveals a game engine with several unusual performance characteristics.

At Medium settings, the Remastered edition can actually outperform the Classic release by a substantial margin while improving visual quality. Standard ray tracing provides a relatively balanced visual upgrade, while path tracing imposes a much heavier workload and can produce inconsistent image-quality results.

More importantly, the benchmark highlights two hardware considerations that are increasingly relevant to modern PC gaming:

First, raw GPU performance does not always translate into higher frame rates. At 1080p and in some path-traced scenarios, high-end GPUs encounter apparent engine or workload ceilings that prevent normal scaling.

Second, VRAM capacity matters. The RTX 5060 Ti comparison demonstrates how an 8GB GPU can collapse under a workload that remains playable on the 16GB version of essentially the same GPU.

For conventional rasterization, The Witcher 3 Remastered appears relatively efficient. For advanced ray tracing and especially path tracing, however, the benchmark demonstrates that VRAM capacity, engine behavior, and rendering-mode overhead can be just as important as the GPU’s theoretical compute performance.