The Witcher 3 Remastered: HairWorks Drags Down PC Performance as Hotfix 5.00c Arrives

Geralt of Rivia's return in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered hasn't gotten off to a great start on PC. According to Vandal, CD Projekt RED has confirmed that some of the performance issues and graphical glitches players are reporting come down to one specific culprit: NVIDIA HairWorks, the technology that makes character hair and creature fur look more realistic.

The good news is that the studio moved quickly. It first recommended turning HairWorks off as a temporary workaround, and has now released hotfix 5.00c for PC with a fix aimed specifically at this issue. This matters because we're talking about one of the community's most beloved RPGs, and because, once again, PC is the platform where a launch shows its seams.

What you need to know

• CD Projekt RED has identified NVIDIA HairWorks as the cause of significant performance drops and visual errors on certain PC configurations.
• While working on the fix, the studio advised affected players to temporarily disable HairWorks.
• It also recommended installing the latest NVIDIA, AMD and Intel drivers to address other graphical and performance issues spotted after launch.
• Hotfix 5.00c is now available on Steam, GOG, Epic Games Store, Battle.net and Xbox Play Anywhere, and includes a fix targeting HairWorks.

What went wrong and who's affected

HairWorks is one of those technologies that looks spectacular in trailers and screenshots but comes at a steep performance cost. Simulating manes, beards and fur in that much detail puts heavy demands on the graphics card, and when the implementation doesn't quite mesh with the rest of the engine, the result is frame drops and visual artifacts that ruin any fight against a griffin. That's exactly what some Remastered players have run into.

It's worth stressing that the issue doesn't affect everyone: the reports mention specific configurations without saying which ones. CD Projekt RED has also split the problem into two fronts. On one side is the HairWorks-related bug; on the other, a set of more general graphical and performance issues, for which the remedy is as classic as it is necessary: update your drivers, whatever GPU you have.

A patch within hours

The most notable thing here is the speed. The hotfix landed just a few hours before Vandal ran the story, and it rolled out simultaneously across every PC store that carries the game. It's rare for a studio to go from public diagnosis to fix that fast, and it says a lot about how precisely they had pinned down the problem.

Our take

Here at Underworld Lordz, we want to give CD Projekt RED credit for two things: it owned up quickly and it communicated clearly. Naming the culprit, offering a temporary workaround and shipping a patch in short order is exactly what we ask of any studio when something goes wrong. That said, we can't just applaud and move on. A remaster of such a well-known game reaching PC with a bug like this in such a recognizable technology suggests that testing across varied configurations fell short. PC isn't a secondary platform, and it shouldn't be treated as a public test bench.

For players who take performance seriously, the advice is simple: update your drivers, install the hotfix and, if you still notice stuttering, turn off HairWorks and compare. There is a visual difference, but in most situations it isn't worth the loss in smoothness. A stable framerate is worth more than the perfect fur on a wolf you're going to dispatch in three hits.

And if you create content, be doubly careful. Recording or streaming a game that's already pushing your hardware multiplies the problems: stuttering on stream, clips full of artifacts and viewers who leave. Before you set up a series or a launch stream, test your setup with the patch applied. And if you make performance videos, make it clear which game version and drivers you're using, because comparisons made before hotfix 5.00c can quickly become outdated.

What do you think?

Have you tried the Remastered on PC with the new patch yet? Do you notice the difference, or are you still playing with HairWorks off just in case? Tell us about your experience and your setup in the team chat or on our Discord: do you think CD Projekt RED deserves applause for its speed or criticism for launching the game in this state?