The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered went live on PC on September 29, replacing the old Complete Edition and bringing native DirectX 12 rendering, path tracing, DLSS 4.5 with Ray Reconstruction, AMD FSR 4 with frame generation, Intel XeSS 2.0, and a marquee new option: Ray-Traced HairWorks, which redoes the lighting and shading on hair and fur using ray tracing instead of the tessellation-based effect the original game shipped with.
A day later, CD Projekt Red told players to turn it back off. According to CD Projekt Red, Ray-Traced HairWorks is causing much larger framerate drops than intended on PC, and that the behavior isn't how the feature is supposed to work. A patch is in progress, but CDPR hasn't given a timeline for it. The bug doesn't appear to hit every system: players seeing smooth performance have no reason to change their settings, but anyone taking a hit should disable the option until the fix lands. One player on Reddit reported a drop from 171 fps to 67 fps with the feature switched on, but that is a single unverified report, not a controlled test or a benchmark.
Separately, CD Projekt Red is also recommending that AMD Radeon owners update their drivers before playing. AMD shipped its Software 26.9.2 driver on September 29, optimized for Witcher 3 Remastered alongside several other new and upcoming releases, including Minecraft Dungeons 2, Modern Warfare 4, Control Resonant, Gears of War: E-Day, and Valor Mortis. CDPR frames the update as avoiding unspecified visual issues and improving the experience on Radeon hardware; that's a separate recommendation from the HairWorks framerate bug, which the studio has attributed to the feature itself rather than to any one vendor's drivers.
The remaster's changes go well past the new rendering options. Geralt's movement and combat animations were reworked, the photo mode was substantially expanded, a new accessibility section was added including a "Bard's Ballad" preset aimed at reducing cognitive load, and the UI picked up changes like a combined loot feed and reorganized skill screen. None of that is new content: CDPR is positioning the remaster as a technical and quality-of-life overhaul of the existing game, not an expansion.
For now, anyone picking up the remaster and noticing a rough framerate has a straightforward troubleshooting step before assuming their hardware is at fault: open the graphics settings and turn Ray-Traced HairWorks off.