Two days after AMD shipped a driver meant to calm the backlash, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered is still losing the review war on Steam. The remaster launched on September 29, 2026, and immediately ran into trouble on AMD Radeon hardware: black artifacts, flickering textures, broken shadows, and in some cases entire forests that simply refused to render. AMD pushed out AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 26.9.2 the same week to address the mess. According to PC Guide, the negative review share on Steam didn’t fall after the patch landed. It climbed, from roughly 32% on launch day to around 35% by September 30.
That’s the strange part of this story. A publisher shipped a fix, a chipmaker shipped a driver, and the review graph kept sliding the wrong way anyway. This piece digs into what’s actually been reported, why a driver update didn’t stop the bleeding, and what it signals about the risk of pairing a decade-old game engine with modern GPU drivers on launch day.
What happened when the remaster launched
CD Projekt Red released The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered on September 29, 2026, overhauling lighting, textures, and character models in a game that first shipped in 2015. The rollout also hit Switch 2 the same week, which meant the studio had two launch narratives running at once. One of them went fine. The other did not.
Players running AMD Radeon graphics cards started posting screenshots within hours of unlock. The complaints followed a consistent pattern: black artifacts baked into surfaces, textures that flickered between correct and corrupted states, broken shadow maps, and missing geometry. One case that circulated widely involved an AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT, where entire forests failed to load, leaving bare terrain where White Orchard’s tree line should have been. Nvidia owners, by most early accounts, had a comparatively clean launch. PC Guide’s initial coverage described the remaster as effectively unplayable for a chunk of the Radeon install base at launch, since release-day drivers weren’t ready in time.
The AMD driver fix that didn’t stop the bleeding
AMD’s response came fast by industry standards. The company released AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 26.9.2, describing it as adding support and optimizations for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered. CD Projekt Red pointed players toward the update directly, telling AMD users that the latest GPU drivers were now available and asking anyone still seeing visual issues to download and install them.
Some players reported that 26.9.2 cleared up most or all of their graphical problems. Others said the issues persisted even after installing it. That split matters, because it means the driver didn’t function as a universal fix. It functioned as a partial one, and partial fixes don’t read the same way in a Steam review as a resolved issue does. A player who still has a problem after updating drivers is, if anything, more frustrated than one who hadn’t tried yet.
Breaking down the Steam review numbers
Here’s where the numbers get interesting. On launch day, PC Guide reported more than 1,100 negative reviews, putting the negative share at approximately 32%. By September 30, a full day after Adrenalin 26.9.2 had already been available for download, that negative share had risen to roughly 35%, per the same outlet’s reporting. That’s not a typo and it’s not a rounding error. The review sentiment got worse, not better, in the window right after the supposed fix shipped.
| Date | Milestone | Reported negative share | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sept 29, 2026 | Game launches on PC and Switch 2 | ~32% negative (1,100+ reviews) | PC Guide |
| Sept 29, 2026 | AMD ships Adrenalin 26.9.2 | Not applicable | AMD |
| Sept 30, 2026 | Negative share rises despite driver update | ~35% negative | PC Guide |
| Oct 1, 2026 | Mixed user reports continue on Steam Community | Ongoing, unconfirmed total | Steam Community reports |
Steam’s review algorithm weights recent reviews heavily when calculating the score shown to shoppers, so a bad 48 hours can do outsized damage to a title’s first impression even if the long-run picture eventually improves. For a remaster riding on nostalgia and word of mouth, that’s the worst possible window to stumble through.
It’s not just AMD users anymore
The detail that complicates the simple “AMD drivers broke the game” narrative is who’s actually posting the negative reviews now. PC Guide’s reporting noted that many of the reviews logged after the driver update appear to be coming from Nvidia users, not just Radeon owners. That shifts the story. If the only people still unhappy were AMD users waiting on a better driver, you’d expect the negative share to plateau once 26.9.2 reached wide adoption. Instead, a second wave of complaints, centered on general performance and technical issues rather than the AMD-specific rendering bugs, appears to be layering on top of the original problem.
That doesn’t mean the AMD rendering bugs and the newer Nvidia-side complaints are the same bug wearing different hardware. It means the remaster shipped with more than one category of problem, and fixing the most visible one (black textures and missing forests on Radeon cards) didn’t touch the rest.
What’s still broken even with the new driver
Based on the pattern of user reports gathered across outlets covering the launch, the AMD-specific symptoms break down into a handful of recurring categories: black artifacts and corrupted textures, flickering between correct and broken rendering states, broken shadow maps, and missing vegetation or geometry, with the RX 9070 XT forest-disappearance bug as the most dramatic example. Reports after Adrenalin 26.9.2 suggest the driver resolved the issue for a meaningful number of affected players, but not everyone. The exact share of users still affected hasn’t been independently confirmed, and treating 26.9.2 as a complete, universal resolution would be getting ahead of the available evidence.
| Reported issue | Status before Adrenalin 26.9.2 | Status after, per user reports |
|---|---|---|
| Black artifacts / corrupted textures | Widely reported on Radeon cards | Resolved for many users; some reports persist |
| Missing forests / vegetation (RX 9070 XT) | Reported, including full forest sections | Fixed for some systems, unconfirmed universally |
| Flickering textures | Reported across multiple GPU models | Mixed results reported post-driver |
| Severe stuttering | Reported at launch | Persists in some post-driver reports |
| General performance complaints (incl. Nvidia) | Not a focus pre-launch | New wave of reviews after driver release |
The Steam store page for the remaster lists support for AMD FSR 4, including Frame Generation and Anti-Lag 2, available on Radeon RX 7000 series cards and newer. That upscaling and frame-gen stack, distributed through the AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition app, is a selling point AMD has leaned on heavily this generation, which makes a rough launch on exactly that hardware more embarrassing than it would be for a studio without an AMD partnership angle to protect.
CD Projekt Red’s response and silence
CD Projekt Red’s public response so far has been narrow and practical: point players at the driver update and move on. The studio recommended AMD users download and install the latest GPU drivers, framing the fix as something happening on AMD’s side of the partnership rather than issuing a separate patch of its own. That’s a defensible position if the rendering bugs really did originate in the driver stack rather than the game code, but it leaves the newer wave of non-AMD-specific complaints unaddressed. As of this writing, there’s no confirmed statement from the studio responding directly to the rising negative review share or to complaints from Nvidia users.
Historical context: a familiar pattern for AMD and big PC launches
Day-one driver scrambles at major PC launches aren’t new, and AMD has been on this side of the story before. The broader pattern, a AAA release shipping ahead of fully-tuned graphics drivers for one vendor, has shown up repeatedly across the last several hardware generations, usually resolved within days or weeks rather than hours. What makes this case notable is the timing: the remaster is riding on nostalgia for a decade-old game, and CD Projekt Red doesn’t have an infinite runway of goodwill left over from Cyberpunk 2077’s rocky 2020 launch, which was serious enough that Sony pulled the game from the PlayStation Store for several months. A remaster is supposed to be the easy win after that history. Instead it’s generating a second round of “wait for patches” advice circulating in player communities.
Why a driver-day patch didn’t fix the review score
There’s a structural reason a same-week driver fix doesn’t automatically repair a Steam review score, and it has nothing to do with whether the fix actually works. Steam’s review system surfaces recent sentiment prominently, and a negative review posted before a fix doesn’t get retracted when the underlying bug is resolved. Many players who hit the bug, got frustrated, and left a review before Adrenalin 26.9.2 existed have no reason to go back and update it. Meanwhile, anyone who updates their driver and still sees a problem, even a smaller one than before, is primed to post a new negative review specifically because they expected the fix to work and it didn’t fully deliver. The result is a review graph that can get worse in the days right after a legitimate improvement ships, simply because the timing of updates doesn’t match the timing of player sentiment.
Market impact: what this means for AMD and Nvidia
The stakes here extend past one game’s review score. AMD has spent this generation trying to close the gap with Nvidia on both raw GPU share and on software polish, areas where Nvidia’s long head start in driver tooling and DLSS adoption has been hard to shake. Recent market data shows just how lopsided that fight still is: desktop GPU shipments reportedly hit 12.5 million units with Nvidia holding around 90% share. A visible, widely covered driver failure at a marquee PC launch doesn’t move market share overnight, but it does feed the perception gap that AMD is trying to close, especially among the exact enthusiast audience most likely to debate GPU choice in public. It also arrives as AMD is navigating broader pricing pressure across its lineup, making reputational hits on the Radeon side harder to absorb than they might have been a year or two ago.
For CD Projekt Red, the exposure is different but just as real. A remaster is a low-risk-seeming way to monetize an existing fan base, and a messy launch undercuts that math. Negative Steam reviews stick around as a visible signal to every future buyer browsing the store page, long after the technical issue itself gets fixed.
Competitive comparison: how this launch stacks up
Compare this to the broader GPU landscape right now, where supply and pricing dominate headlines more than driver stability does. The RTX 5090’s disappearance from US retail shelves at prices north of $9,500 shows a market where Nvidia’s top-end cards are scarce enough that driver polish is almost beside the point, buyers can’t get the hardware regardless. AMD doesn’t have that luxury. Radeon’s pitch to PC gamers rests heavily on being the dependable, better-value alternative, and a launch where its flagship RX 9070 XT users saw entire forests vanish from a showcase title cuts directly against that pitch. It’s a reminder that software quality assurance matters just as much as the silicon when a GPU vendor is trying to win over price-conscious buyers who are already skeptical of switching brands.
What other PC players are watching
The remaster also launched into a crowded week for PC and console hardware news. CD Projekt Red had already drawn attention with its separate modding community activity around the base game, which means the studio’s Witcher 3 ecosystem was already under a magnifying glass before the remaster’s driver issues surfaced. That overlapping attention cuts both ways: it means more eyeballs on the eventual fix, but also more eyeballs on every stumble along the way.
Predictions: where this goes from here
A few things look likely to play out over the coming weeks, based on how similar driver-related launch controversies have typically resolved:
- AMD will likely ship at least one more follow-up driver revision targeting whatever edge cases survive 26.9.2, following its usual pattern of iterative hotfixes after a high-profile launch complaint.
- The negative review share should gradually soften over the next one to two weeks as the driver fix reaches wider adoption, though Steam’s recent-review window means the “Mixed” or “Mostly Positive” label could stick around longer than the underlying bug does.
- CD Projekt Red faces growing pressure to issue a direct statement addressing the newer wave of non-AMD-specific performance complaints, separate from the driver messaging aimed at Radeon owners.
- Expect this episode to get cited as a cautionary example the next time CD Projekt Red or another studio plans a day-one remaster launch alongside a new hardware generation, reinforcing calls for earlier driver collaboration with GPU vendors.
- AMD’s QA relationship with major publishers will likely face more public scrutiny heading into the next wave of AAA releases built on upgraded engines, given how visible this particular failure became.
What players should do right now
If you own an AMD Radeon GPU and are planning to play the remaster, installing AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 26.9.2 before launching the game is the baseline step, since it’s the only officially released fix targeting these symptoms. Beyond that, checking in-game settings for FSR 4, Frame Generation, and Anti-Lag 2, all listed as supported on RX 7000 series cards and newer on the game’s Steam page, can help confirm the upscaling stack is behaving as expected. If problems persist after updating, the most useful thing to do is document the issue (GPU model, driver version, specific symptom) and report it through official channels rather than assuming the driver update alone resolved everything, since reports indicate it has not done so universally.
The bigger picture for remasters and driver risk
None of this means the remaster is a disaster or that CD Projekt Red mishandled the entire launch. Most of the loudest complaints trace back to a specific, identifiable category of bug on specific hardware, and AMD moved on a fix within the same week rather than letting it linger for months. But the continued climb in negative reviews after that fix shipped is a useful data point for anyone tracking how review platforms actually behave around patch cycles. A technically correct fix and a recovered review score are two different problems, and closing the gap between them usually takes longer than the headline “driver update released” suggests.
Frequently asked questions
Did AMD’s Adrenalin 26.9.2 driver fix The Witcher 3 Remastered’s problems?
Partially. AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 26.9.2 was released with support and optimizations for the remaster, and some players reported that it resolved most or all of their visual issues. Other players reported the problems persisted after updating, so it has not been confirmed as a universal fix.
Why are Steam reviews still negative after the driver update?
According to PC Guide, the negative review share rose from about 32% on launch day to about 35% the day after the driver released. Reviews posted before the fix don’t get retracted, and a second wave of complaints, including from Nvidia users, appears to have added to the total.
Which AMD GPU was most affected by the launch bugs?
Reports singled out the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT, where some players saw entire forest sections fail to render. Other Radeon models were also affected by black artifacts and flickering textures, based on user reports gathered across coverage of the launch.
Is The Witcher 3 Remastered broken on Nvidia GPUs too?
Most early reports described a cleaner launch experience on Nvidia hardware compared to AMD. However, PC Guide reported that many reviews posted after the AMD driver update appear to come from Nvidia users citing general performance and technical issues rather than the AMD-specific rendering bugs.
What does AMD FSR 4 support mean for this remaster?
The game’s Steam store page lists support for AMD FSR 4, including Frame Generation and Anti-Lag 2, on Radeon RX 7000 series cards and newer. That makes the rendering bugs on current-generation Radeon hardware more notable, since it’s exactly the hardware AMD’s upscaling push is meant to showcase.
Should I wait to buy The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt – Remastered?
If you’re on AMD Radeon hardware, installing Adrenalin 26.9.2 before purchase and checking recent Steam reviews for your specific GPU model is a reasonable precaution, since reports of lingering issues continue even after the driver update.
How do I install the Adrenalin 26.9.2 driver?
AMD Radeon users can download AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 26.9.2 through the AMD Software application’s update check or directly from AMD’s official driver release notes page before launching the game.
Has CD Projekt Red commented on the ongoing negative reviews?
CD Projekt Red has recommended that AMD users install the latest GPU drivers, but there is no confirmed statement from the studio directly addressing the continued rise in negative reviews or the complaints coming from Nvidia users.
