PC gamers can now install a small The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt mod that substantially improves the game's raytracing performance without massive sacrifices on the visual side of things. While the next-gen update for the game has introduced a number of impressive graphical improvements, these have come with a hefty performance penalty, too, that many players are hoping to resolve.
While The Witcher 3 now boasts one of the most impressive lighting systems implemented in a video game, the game's RT features are extremely taxing on the hardware. Some of its most punishing locales, such as the bustling city of Novigrad, can tank even the highest-end GPUs, and since the game is still CPU-bound, it takes Nvidia's frame-generating DLSS 3.0 to go over 60 FPS in some of these instances.
CDPR has issued a few hotfixes for The Witcher 3 that resolved some of the game's stuttering, but performance has been rather disappointing for many gamers. That's where alikoko's Optimized Raytracing mod comes in, which tweaks the game's lighting to substantially improve performance without outright eviscerating its raytracing systems. Specifically, alikoko has finely tuned the game's global illumination coverage which results in a hefty 35% performance bump on an RTX 2060 Super. The modder also notes that none of the other RT features have been touched, implying that further optimization could be coming down the line, too.
The fact that The Witcher 3's next-gen update caused problems is hardly secret now. On PC, many players have faced immense framerate drops even without the raytracing enabled, and some have theorized that this may have something to do with the way DirectX 12 has been handled. Alikoko's mod won't resolve the fact that the game is heavily bottlenecked by CPU in some instances, of course, but Nvidia users hoping to leverage the game's RT features without experiencing single-digit framerates now have a way of doing so.
The Witcher 3's second PC hotfix came out less than a week ago, but it too failed to address the game's performance issues. Judging by alikoko's work, it's not that CDPR doesn't have any further options to optimize its RT implementation, so it's entirely possible that a future update may lead to even more substantial performance uplifts without forcing gamers to install community-provided mods.
For the time being, alikoko's small and simple mod should allow more players to experience The Witcher 3's game-changing ray tracing, which goes beyond what was seen in Cyberpunk 2077 in some respects. It may be worth pointing out that CDPR's official hotfixes and updates may break this mod, so keeping up with the modder's own potential future updates may come in handy.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is available now for PC, PS4, PS5 Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
Source: Nexus Mods