The Witcher 3 Remastered hits 140K concurrent on Steam, highest since 2020

The Witcher 3 Remastered hit 139,749 concurrent players on Steam over the weekend — the highest peak since the Cyberpunk 2077 launch hype carried it to 103K in December 2020, according to SteamDB. CD Projekt Red marked the moment on social channels, calling it "much love" for an 11-year-old RPG.

The remaster ships free to existing owners. It migrates the game from the original REDengine 3 to REDengine 4 (the Cyberpunk 2077 engine), adding ray-traced global illumination, DLSS 3.5 with ray reconstruction, and FSR 3.1 frame generation. CDPR says load times drop 30–50% on PCIe 4.0 SSDs, and the remaster leverages DirectStorage where available. The patch also folds in all previously released DLC and the Netflix armor sets.

Performance is mixed early. Users report 60+ FPS at 1440p on an RTX 4070 with DLSS Quality and medium RT, but 1% lows can dip into the 40s in Novigrad with full RT cranked. AMD cards gain more from FSR 3.1 frame gen than they did with the old TSR upscaler, though native performance without upscaling still trails NVIDIA at equivalent tiers. The engine swap means old mods break — the Nexus community is scrambling to update script extenders and UI overhauls.

It's a real upgrade if you skipped the 2022 next-gen patch or never finished the base game. The RT overhead is steep, but DLSS 3.5 does more heavy lifting than older DLSS 2 implementations. If you're on a 30-series or older card, expect to lean on frame gen or dial back shadows.

Check your settings for The Witcher 3 — BetterFPS can run a playbook and see if your rig hits 60 FPS with the new RT features without melting your 1% lows.