Next-Gen Witchering Ain't All it's Cracked Up to Be

I'm just not one of those people who care deeply about the most uber-graphics settings for my games, so the next-gen update to The Witcher 3 wasn't earthshattering news.  I finally decided to get around to checking it out to see what it has to offer.  True to form, it offers a whole smattering of fancy new graphics settings.  Last time I tried to change the settings (when it was first released), it crashed it right to desktop.  The initial release for the next-gen update was pretty rocky, but those issues have been fixed.  To tweak the settings to be "optimized," I decided to use the NVIDIA GeForce Experience to pick the best settings.  It, of course, opted to turn on ray tracing, which I would normally skip.  My poor GPU, which always ran smooth as silk, sounded a little bit strained under the new settings.  So, since I don't really care about the very slight difference in shadow quality and whatnot, I opted to turn the settings back down into a comfortable "medium" range of settings.  My GPU immediately thanked me, but I started to notice some weirdness that I've never experienced before.  Firstly, there are occasionally some weird sort of flashy, line-like visual disturbances near the bottom of my screen (possibly some light screen tearing).  It's annoying mostly.

Just leave poor Geralt alone!

The other thing I noticed after I lowered the settings was the fact that some textures seemed to not load.  I mostly noticed this during cutscenes in story missions.  Again, it's something I never experienced prior to this update, but was another documented technical issue with earlier versions of the next-gen update.

So, needless to say, I've been a bit disappointed with this "update."  I want my old, normal version of TW3 back--it worked perfectly fine and had no issues (for me).  I've also had a few crashes (which seem to have stopped now that I've lowered the settings).  Just be aware that if you're going to crank up the ol' graphics settings, you might have some problems you didn't have before.