The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Blood and Wine Performance Analysis

Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry has analyzed the technical make-up of the second and final expansion to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Blood and Wine, and came away with good news for players on all platforms. Not only is performance on consoles much steadier than it was in the base game, while being no slouches in the graphical department either:

The good news is this area looks gorgeous on both consoles, but a question hangs over how performance holds up. In going into such a detail-rich area, we’d hope to not see a repeat of Crookback Bog’s performance – an area of the base game in which PS4 and Xbox One played closer to 20fps. Fortunately, this Blood and Wine expansion’s first two hours run at a near locked 30fps for the most part, and Geralt’s journeys by horseback are only interrupted by occasional, one-off stutters.

However, as we venture closer to the city, Xbox One begins to fall short of PS4’s performance level. Both consoles suffer a single streaming hiccup as we approach the castle (an irregular, one-off 15fps hitch that’s hard to repeat), but it’s Xbox One that continues to drop frames after this point. Cantering through a bustling market street, Xbox One settles at a 28-30fps range of performance overall, compared to a sturdier 30fps line on PS4. The good news is that moving further into the city puts both neck-and-neck at the target 30fps once again. 

And here’s a video comparison between the two console versions, showing how the framerate holds up throughout the first few hours of gameplay: