Blood and Wine, the third and final expansion pack for The Witcher 3, delivers a solid performance across consoles and maintains much of the graphical fidelity witness on the PC version of the DLC, according to Digital Foundry's bench of each build.
The stability of the expansion may come as a relief to those who played the PlayStation 4 version of Fallout 4's Far Harbor. However, area-specific issues could turn up once players poke and prod every inch of the game.
Better than offering stable gameplay, Blood and Wine is touted as introducing to the game the latest performance enhancements from developer CD Projekt Red. With the expansion, the studio has improved the way the game packages assets and geometry for more efficient memory utilization.
"As for console performance, well we'd hoped to not see a repeat of the Crookback Bog area in the base game, where both consoles slipped below the 30 fps target," says Digital Foundry. "Thankfully, the Blood and Wine Expansion's first two hours play really well at a near locked 30 fps. However, as we get closer to the big city, Xbox One does fall noticeably short of PS4."
While Blood and Wine delivers a relatively smooth performance across platforms, there remain little differences in each build that warrant a Digital Foundry breakdown. For starters, the PC version draws more detailed shadows at long range and more object at extreme range than the console versions.
Like the core game, the PS4 version of Blood and Wine is rendered at 1,920 x 1,080 and the Xbox One build runs at a variable resolution that hovers around 1,600 x 900.
"Xbox One's results are blurrier, owing to its lower native resolution. But texture quality up close is broadly a match for PC's top setting," says Digital Foundry.
Noting all of the technical improvements released in Blood and Wine, Digital Foundry indicated that CD Projekt Red's upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 could benefit from the studios stronger grasp of the current gen consoles and the lessons it has learned from what probably is the last entry in The Witcher series.
