Digital Foundry Face-Off: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (PC/PS4/XB1)
Purely in visual terms, PS4 and Xbox One miss out on PC's ultra-grade settings in several areas, but the game still looks complete on each. At its core, REDengine 3 drives a high level of foliage detail on console - perhaps the greatest density of plant-life since the original Crysis, rendering trees in at a surprisingly long range. Factoring in time of day, weather systems and rolling clouds, The Witcher 3's physically-based lighting model also impresses, with shadows spread dynamically from each swaying branch, and light shafts flitting between each leaf. In the right light, the final result helps even the bleakest points in No Man's Land's marshes to achieve a great sense of atmosphere.
With consoles set to patch 1.01 and PC at the latest 1.03, it's fair to say only PS4 can compete with a mainstream gaming PC in terms of pixel-count. Rendering at a native 1920x1080, Sony's platform gives a far crisper looking image at every turn, flattering the game's foliage-heavy details at range. Meanwhile, the promised 'dynamic resolution' solution on Xbox One doesn't appear to hit the 1080p target in any of our samples. Instead, for the most part the game renders at 1600x900, with only video cut-scenes providing true 1080p output for any noticeable length of time.
PC sets itself apart in several key areas though. With foliage visibility range set to ultra, we get trees, plants and accompanying shadows rendered at a range far beyond anything possible on console. By comparison, PS4 and Xbox One treat each of these variables individually; trees use an equivalent to its medium setting, while foliage is on high, and shadow draw distance is low. It's a hybrid setup that can only be matched on PC by tweaking its .ini file variables manually (found in your documents folder). However, on the console front, both are exactly matched with each other in this area.
This granular approach to optimising for PS4 and Xbox One applies to texture quality too. Here we get a mixture of the PC's medium and high settings, based on which segment of the world you inspect. As a rule of thumb, consoles rarely match PC's best 2024x2024 resolution textures, though low-priority objects with blurrier maps are shared for all three versions. Ground textures in almost every case lack PC's sharpness, and also fall short of its 16x anisotropic filtering. Xbox One gives the worst results here, and in Novigrad City's main plaza, PS4 hits a mid-point in filtering quality between the other two platforms.
Having played all three versions extensively this week, it must be said PC is a must for its extras, as well as for its solid, multi-threaded optimisation across all setups tested. On the console front, as of update 1.01 the PS4 version is king thanks to a cleaner 1080p image and slightly smoother frame-pacing - though we hope its hitches are addressed soon in a patch.
