CD Projekt Red released Witcher 3's long-overdue 1.07 patch last week. It took a while to be completed, but maybe it needed a little more work than that.
Eurogamer.net's Digital Foundry analyzed the effects of the patch on all versions of the game and concluded that while it fixes some problems, it introduces new ones: most notably, the framerate becomes significantly slower. In some areas on XBox One, the rendering speed crawls down to a mere 20 frames a second.
"Essentially, gameplay on Xbox One now appears to rely on a similar double-buffer v-sync set-up to the PS4 game, locking its frame-rate to 20fps during these lulls in performance," said Digital Foundry. "This means that the reading on our graph is consistently lower on patch 1.07 as compared to 1.05, where it was free to waver between 20-30fps freely. On a matching route through the bog, frame-rate can be up to 8fps slower on the latest version of the game. On top of that, even traveling through simple countryside roads (or Novigrad's central city) continues to produce single-frame stutters every few seconds--a rough point we had hoped would be ironed out by now. Overall, little has improved in PS4's bid for a smooth 30fps reading here, and in fact, the tail-end of our Novigrad test shows dips to 25fps as we hit the marketplace--something not seen on the last patch."
Naturally, these framerate problems do not occur in the PC version because it can be tailored to run in accordance with your machine's processing speed. But there is a glitch that's getting attention: there have been reports that some Achievements are failing to work properly.
CD Projekt Red is looking into the problems and may introduce a solution soon. In the meantime, it's up to you if you want to install the patch or not. Keep in mind that despite the framerate, it fixes a lot of other glitches you might find more annoying.
