CD Projekt Red has published new minimum and recommended PC specifications for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered, and the witcher 3 remastered requirements sit well above the decade-old original’s floor. The free upgrade for existing Complete Edition owners, revealed during Geoff Keighley’s Gamescom 2026 Opening Night Live, launches on September 29.
It isn’t a new purchase: owners of the Complete Edition on PC will see their existing installation update to the Remaster on release day, picking up the visual, performance and gameplay changes CD Projekt Red detailed at the show. The specifications below come from the Remaster’s Battle.net store listing rather than independent testing, so how the game actually runs on minimum-tier hardware won’t be confirmed until reviewers get hands-on time closer to launch.
What the new Witcher 3 Remastered requirements demand
The refreshed minimum calls for Windows 11 (64-bit), a six-core CPU such as the AMD Ryzen 5 2600 or Intel Core i5-8400, 12GB of RAM, and a GPU no weaker than an RX 5500 XT, Arc A580 or GTX 1660. Listing options across AMD, Intel and Nvidia, rather than defaulting to one vendor, reflects that minimum-spec testing on PC now has three GPU makers to account for rather than two.
That floor is a full generational reset from 2015, when The Witcher 3 ran on an Intel Core i5-2500K or an AMD A10-5800K, chips that predate the current CPU generation by well over a decade. According to TechPowerUp, which compared the old and new spec sheets, the new minimum now exceeds the original’s recommended CPU tier and roughly matches its old recommended GPU tier: what used to be the ceiling for a decent experience is now the floor. Anyone still on that era of hardware, including APU-class chips like the A10-5800K, is looking at a full upgrade rather than a tweak just to launch the Remaster, not merely to hit recommended settings.
Why the floor moved
The Remaster’s headline addition is Path Tracing, which typically demands more GPU than a minimum-tier card provides; a GTX 1660 or an RX 5500 XT doesn’t have the ray-tracing throughput to run it well, so it sits as a separate, heavier option rather than something baked into the baseline. The listed floor is for standard rendering: denser assets, reworked lighting and a generally heavier engine, which need a genuine six-core CPU and a discrete GPU just to hold a stable frame rate before path tracing is ever switched on.
The number that didn’t move
Not every figure grew. The full install, covering both Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine, needs just 70GB, modest against current single-player releases that increasingly cross 100GB. By our arithmetic, going from a 70GB footprint to that 100GB mark would be a 42.9% increase; the Remaster’s overhauled renderer didn’t come with that trade attached.
What to watch: the recommended specification for higher settings hasn’t been fully detailed yet, and every figure so far is a vendor listing rather than a benchmarked result. Independent testing once the Remaster ships on September 29 will show whether the new minimum tier holds up at 1080p, and whether Path Tracing is realistically playable on anything short of the recommended hardware.
