REDengine 3 was designed to run exclusively on a 64-bit software platform, CD Projekt RED created REDengine 3 for the purpose of developing open world video game environments, such as those of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

It introduces improvements to facial and other animations. Lighting effects no longer suffer from reduced contrast ratio. REDengine 3 also supports volumetric effects enabling advanced rendering of clouds, mist, fog, smoke, and other particle effects. There is also support for high resolution textures and mapping, as well as dynamic physics and an advanced dialogue lip syncing system. However, due to limitations on texture streaming, use of high resolution textures may not always be the case.

REDengine 3 has a flexible renderer prepared for deferred or forward+ rendering pipelines. The result is a wide array of cinematic effects, including bokeh depth-of-view, color grading and lens flares associated with multiple lighting.

The terrain system in REDengine 3 uses tessellation and layers varying material, which can then be easily blended.