The Witcher 3 in Beautiful 4K on Xbox One X
First things first; The Witcher 3 is hands down, without question, shut your dirty mouth if you don’t think so, one of the single most beautiful games of this generation. Stunning vistas, carefully crafted and intricate environments, and a world you can easily lose yourself to. Now turn that shit up to 11. That’s what we’ll be getting with the Xbox One X Enhanced version, whose official patch is now listed as ‘Coming Soon’ on Microsoft’s website.
But that’s not ‘nearly here’ I can hear you screaming. No, not officially, but for reference whenever a game’s Xbox One X status has changed from ‘In Development’ to ‘Coming Soon’ it was a week or so before the patch dropped. Translation: Merry Christmas, Witcher fans!
When CD Projekt RED shared their plans for the Xbox One X Enhanced version of The Witcher 3, they had the following to say;
With the additional power of the Xbox One X, we are able to deliver The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt in 4K, while providing numerous visual tweaks such as higher-quality shadows, ambient occlusion & texture filtering, as well as higher resolution textures, and an all-around performance boost.
Thanks to 4K, we can show everything our artists created with more detail. And it’s not just owners of a 4K TV who will benefit from the higher resolution. Thanks to supersampling, the leap in quality will be visible even on a 1080p screen.
When we saw the PS4 Pro improvements for the game the enhancements included 16x Anisotropic Filtering and Horizon Based Ambient Occlusion (HBAO), and a 2160p image delivered via checkerboard rendering that was reconstructed for a base 1920×2160 resolution (according to Digital Foundry). What will be truly interesting is seeing what CDPR can do with the extra boost that the Xbox One X provides.