I have a gtx 980 ti ( i know i need to upgrade ), Im curious if there is anyone out there still running this while trying to play The Witcher 3. I cant find much on the topic recently and want the best playthrough I can get visually. In graphic setting it says dsll not available, im assuming that has to do with ray tracing and I know my gpu doesnt support that. Any tips would be greatly appreciated. Cheers!

This video from 2015 suggests you should be fine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGhAWHGMhPM

IF, however you meant the recent upgrade / remaster stuff Ive no idea, but im sure you can do a quick search for it. Since the pandemic and graphic card shortage, benchmarking videos for all sorts of cards and games have become more common - especially budget ones / older models.

Yeah Ive researched it quite a bit and havent found anything pertaining to my setup since the next gen update. I was hoping someone here could give me some insight. Thanks for your help

It's still an alright gpu imo, 980ti, 1080 and 1080ti even nowadays can (with some setting tweaking) get you very nice looking game at 60fps.

No idea if you mean the Witcha3 recently updated version with raytracing etc or the previous version. The classic one should run fine on 980ti, esp. with lower MSAA (or even no AA for 1440p) and maybe lowered shadow quality a notch. The new update however likely has considerably higher requirements, while current gpu drivers were not optimized for gtx900 for years now. So combined the performance might vary in such cases. I would stick with the classic version 1.32 from 2018. It should still be available for download or through rollback via galaxy if you use it.

DLSS is just for rtx cards, but thanks to amd you can use their implementation of FSR on your card (I think that 900 series runs better on fsr1 quality, than fsr2 quality setting). No idea how it would perform. I don't use these upscalers except in cases where I really can't hit the freesync/gsync targets.

Nvidia's DLSS, AMD's FSR and Intel's XeSS all lower the picture quality slightly and increase performance. Especially Nvidia's DLSS reached amazing levels of quality in the v 2.1--2.4. Version 3.0 is technically different and may look like **** but it inserts fake frames, so is a way to increase perceived fluidity when the processor or memory is the limiting factor.

6GB VRAM
DirectX 12 (12_1)
OpenGL 4.6
OpenCL 3.0
Vulkan 1.3
CUDA 5.2
Shader Model 6.7 (6.4)

(Inside parantheses are the levels of full hardware support.)

Compare to the latest from Nvidia (yes I know there is also AMD and Intel):

DirectX 12 Ultimate (12_2)
OpenGL 4.6
OpenCL 3.0
Vulkan 1.3
CUDA 8.9
Shader Model 6.7
aaaand hardware support for raytracing.

Biggest difference is the CUDA and RT and CUDA is used in work.

At 1080p the GTX 980Ti should be capable but will be extremely weak at raytracing since it lacks dedicated hardware support for it. If your monitor has a higher resolution, an upgrade is recommended but you still cannot get high framerate with even the top card (Nvidias RTX 4090) on a 4k monitor if you want the highest settings with maximum ray-tracing in all games.

I do not have that graphics card nor do I have the game so cannot help more.