RTX 5060 Runs The Witcher 3 Next-Gen With Path Tracing, And It Looks Stunning

You know that feeling when a game looks so good you just have to stop and stare? That's exactly what happened when Reddit user Scorpwind dropped a batch of screenshots running The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt on an RTX 5060 with path tracing and DLSS Ray Reconstruction (RR) cranked on. And yeah, Toussaint has never looked this good.

The shots show off rural Toussaint in all its glory — wooden cottages, courtyards, town archways, and candlelit interiors. Sunlight spilling across vegetation and architecture brings out a level of detail that makes you want to slow-walk through every village just to soak it in.

But here's the catch: path tracing isn't cheap, especially on VRAM. Scorpwind explained that while the overall preset is Ultra+, they had to keep textures at High because Ultra+ textures simply won't fit. In rural areas, VRAM usage peaks around 6.8GB, but once you hit NPC-dense cities, it climbs to roughly 7.5GB. To keep things looking sharp, they stuck with High textures and enabled HairWorks (High) along with path-traced hair.

There's a CPU angle here too. In the comments, Scorpwind noted that their R7 5700X can barely scrape 60fps in rasterization mode, and path tracing plus ray tracing piles even more pressure on the processor. Their fix? Locking the frame rate to 30fps, which stretches the per-frame CPU budget from 16.6ms to 33.3ms and gives the system some breathing room.

It's a solid reminder that ray tracing isn't just a GPU workout — your CPU matters too, and sometimes a lower frame cap is the smoothest path forward.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was developed by CD Projekt Red and supports path tracing, DLSS Ray Reconstruction, and more on PC. It's available across PC, PS5, NS2, and Xbox Series X|S.

So, are you planning to revisit the Continent with ray tracing on, or are you waiting for a beefier GPU first? Let us know in the comments!