CD Projekt Red has updated the minimum system requirements for The Witcher: Wild Hunt on PC, most notably ending support for hard-disk drives and Windows 10. Only solid-state drives and Windows 11 will be supported going forward.
The move has been made in preparation for a third Witcher 3 expansion – Songs of the Past – arriving next year. CD Projekt Red said: “With new content coming to the game, we need to update our system requirements to ensure smooth performance and compatibility going forward for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Songs of the Past.”
Starting from the next update, which is as yet undated, the minimum system requirements of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, an 11 year-old game, will rise to:
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 2600, Intel Core i5-8400
- GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660, AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT 8GB
- VRAM: 6 GB
- RAM: 12 GB
- Storage: 70 GB SSD
- OS: 64-bit Windows 11
For comparison, the current minimum system requirements for The Witcher 3, as listed on Steam, are:
- CPU: Intel CPU Core i5-2500K 3.3GHz / AMD A10-5800K APU (3.8GHz)
- GPU: NVIDIA GPU GeForce GTX 660 / AMD GPU Radeon HD 7870
- RAM: 6 GB
- Storage: 50 GB available space
- OS *: 64-bit Windows 7, 64-bit Windows 8 (8.1)
It’s a considerable change. “These minimum requirements reflect how hardware capabilities and software usage have evolved since we last changed the system requirements,” CD Projekt Red explained.
The switch to Windows 11 reflects Microsoft ending support for Windows 10 last year. “Without ongoing security updates, official platform support, and continued GPU driver support, we will no longer test our games on Windows 10,” CD Projekt Red stated.
The Windows 11 requirement also affects other PC components in that The Witcher 3 will “exclusively” run on DirectX 12, and “only processors supported on Windows 11 will be supported by us”, and “only graphics cards with ongoing active driver support for gaming on Windows 11 will be supported”.
Hard-disk drives are no longer being supported because solid-state drives offer better overall performance and faster loading times and asset streaming, CD Projekt Red added.
Note, however, that you can revert to earlier versions of The Witcher 3 should you be potentially affected by this. CD Projekt Red has a guide on how to do this.
It’s a curious change to make. On the one hand, it suggests there’s an exciting level of technical ambition being employed on the third Witcher 3 expansion, and that CD Projekt Red and Fool’s Theory – the co-developer – intend to make something that looks impressive by today’s standards.
On the other hand, an 11 year-old game can’t help but have a foot in the past, and there’s a danger of alienation if people’s PC hardware isn’t powerful enough, or if people have made deliberate decisions not to move to Windows 10. It’s not a forgiving market to upgrade your PC in, currently, either, with component pricing pushed sky-high by rampant big-tech demand for AI data-centers.
Nevertheless, it is impressive to see CD Projekt Red continue to expand The Witcher 3 so late in the game’s life, even if there’s a slight financial pressure here to hit revenue targets in order to meet company bonus targets.
