The next-gen version of The Witcher 3 hasn’t suffered from a lack of attention after its release.up to date 4.03 patch (opens in new tab) is packed with bug fixes and improvements.eliminate the ability to eat food underwater (opens in new tab) is certainly near the top of the list, but beyond that, it also introduces Intel XeSS support.
The Witcher 3’s next-gen update is taxing, even for high-end PCs. Intel’s Arc cards may be affordable, but that means you won’t get RTX 4090 or 7900 XTX levels of performance. XeSS support is definitely welcome as all the frame rate bonuses are useful.
Zess (opens in new tab) is a competitor to Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR upscaling technology. DLSS is exclusive to Nvidia graphics cards, while XeSS (and FSR) can run on most modern graphics cards. Of course, if you have an Nvidia card, you’re going to run DLSS and FSR on an AMD card, but XeSS remains the only upscaling technology with AI acceleration cross-platform.
Intel’s Arc graphics card may not have beaten the competition (opens in new tab), the Intel drivers are better than they were 6 months ago, but still have room for improvement. But one area where Intel gets quite a bit of praise is his XeSS, which works very well even without DLSS 3.0. (opens in new tab) Magical frame generation ability.
XeSS might be worth a try with The Witcher 3 for some good laughs no matter what card you have, but it’s worth enabling if you’re running an Intel Arc card.
Apart from XeSS support, the 4.03 patch also brings many ray tracing bug fixes and general performance improvements to ray tracing global illumination and reflections. There may not be Henry Cavill in the bathtub, but The Witcher 3 will definitely shine and look really shiny if you have a good enough graphics card.
