Spec boxes flag a coming change
The Witcher 3’s Steam listing has grown a footnote. Both the minimum and the recommended spec boxes on the game’s store page now end with the same line, “System requirements will change on 2026.09.29”, which is the day CD Projekt Red ships The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered as a free upgrade.
CD Projekt Red announced the remaster on August 25 at Gamescom Opening Night Live, alongside a first look at Songs of the Past, a new expansion due in 2027. Existing owners get Remastered at no cost on GOG, Steam, Epic, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Switch 2, and everyone who owns the base game also gets Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine for free. The one thing the announcement skipped was the new PC spec sheet.
What is still live on the store page is the 2015 one. The minimum asks for 64-bit Windows 7 or 8.1, a Core i5-2500K, 6GB of RAM, a GeForce GTX 660 and DirectX 11 in 50GB of space. Closer to the remaster, the Songs of the Past store page lists 64-bit Windows 11, a Core i5-8400 or Ryzen 5 2600, 12GB of RAM, a GTX 1660, RX 5500 XT 8GB or Arc A580, and 70GB of storage. Those figures belong to the expansion rather than the base upgrade, though Steam credits Fool’s Theory and Yigsoft as co-developers on it.
Two rounds of PC work have already been bolted onto this game. December 2022 brought the next-gen update, which added ray tracing and DLSS 3, a version Nvidia has since replaced twice over with the 4.5 release it put at the centre of its own Gamescom showcase. Patch 4.01 followed on February 2, 2023, adding a performance mode for ray-traced global illumination and fixing screen space reflections that the patch notes say weren’t working on PC despite being switched on. Neither round moved the stated minimum, which still names DirectX 11.
Some of the visual work is coming from outside the studio again. The creator of The Witcher 3’s HD Reworked Project said this week that CD Projekt Red brought them in to collaborate on Remastered, the same arrangement the 2022 update used. Asked what stands out, level design lead Miles Tost pointed at the art: “Geralt has never looked this good, even after all those years of retirement.” CD Projekt Red also lists a modernised camera, a new targeting system, new finishers and a revamped ability system.
Whether any of that can be switched off is still unanswered, which matters to anyone who wants the new textures and not the new combat. Songs of the Past is a year further out, Remastered is already up for pre-purchase on Battle.net, and the Switch 2 version is a native build rather than a stream. The store page is where the missing spec sheet will show up first, and it has a month to fill in.
