A new mod for The Witcher 3 significantly improves the game’s raytracing performance with minimal visual degradation. But there’s a catch.

PC players can now install a small The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt mod that significantly improves the game’s raytracing performance. And without making huge sacrifices on the visual side. While the game’s next-gen update brought several impressive graphical improvements, they were accompanied by a severe performance drawback.

Even though The Witcher 3 now boasts one of the unique lighting systems implemented in a video game, the game’s RT features are extremely taxing on the hardware.

CDPR has released some hotfixes for The Witcher 3 that have solved some of the game’s problems. But performance has been disappointing for many players. This is where alikoko’s Optimised Raytracing mod comes in. This modifies the game’s lighting to improve performance without outright gutting the raytracing systems. Specifically, alikoko has fine-tuned the game’s global lighting coverage. This results in a significant performance increase of 35% for an RTX 2060 Super. The modder also notes that the other RT features have not been touched. This suggests that further optimisation may come in the future.

That The Witcher 3 next-gen update has caused problems is hardly a secret anymore. Many players have experienced colossal framerate drops even without raytracing enabled on PC. Some have speculated that this may have something to do with DirectX 12 handling. Of course, Alikoko’s mod will not change the fact that the game is severely CPU bottlenecked in some cases. However, Nvidia users hoping to take advantage of the game’s RT features without experiencing single-digit frame rates now have a way to do so.

The second PC hotfix for the game was released less than a week ago, but it still failed to address the game’s performance issues.

Judging from Alikoko’s work, it’s not that CDPR doesn’t have further options to optimise the RT implementation, so it’s entirely possible that a future update could result in even more significant performance gains without forcing players to install community-supplied mods.

For the time being, alikoko’s small and simple mod will allow more players to experience the gameplay-changing ray tracing of The Witcher 3. In some ways, this goes beyond what we saw in Cyberpunk 2077. It may be worth pointing out that official hotfixes and updates from CDPR could ruin this mod. Thus, the modder’s own possible future updates will be worth monitoring.

Source: Nexus Mods