The Witcher 3 Remastered's first patch is out, and CD Projekt says turn HairWorks off

Three days after The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered went out, CD Projekt Red has published its first patch and, on a different channel, told PC players to switch one of its graphics settings off.

What Patch 5.00b does

The studio's own post covers PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and the Xbox Play Anywhere PC version, and lists three things. DLSS was unavailable in that Xbox Play Anywhere build and now is not. Lighting has been adjusted in a number of places, including interiors that were coming out too dark. And the console versions get further unspecified changes aimed at keeping them in line with the PC release.

CD Projekt also says a separate PC hotfix is in preparation for a reported problem with saving, and that it is still working through player reports filed via its technical support portal. DSOGaming describes the save failure as a storage-space error appearing even when space is available.

The HairWorks warning

The more immediately useful advice did not come in the patch notes at all. CD Projekt Red's support account has told PC players it has identified an issue with NVIDIA HairWorks that can significantly hurt performance, and recommends turning the setting off "until this is addressed in a patch". HairWorks is the hair simulation that gives Geralt and several monsters their individually rendered strands, and it has been a reliable frame-rate tax since 2015 - but not, until now, one the developer has asked people to disable.

Why it matters

A remaster whose selling point is that it looks better is a bad place to lose frames to an eleven-year-old hair setting, and the fix on offer today is to make Geralt's hair worse. The patch itself is small and leaves the PC build's two most-reported problems, HairWorks and saves, for later.