The Witcher 3 Remastered crushes GPUs with path tracing, but free mod claws save up to 30% performance
Following its surprise announcement during this year’s edition Gamescom opening night live, The Witcher 3 Remastered is now available on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|SAnd Nintendo Switch2. While the number of gameplay improvements is staggering and well thought out, what most were looking forward to was the visual improvement, which includes some very demanding features. path tracing support on PC. Fortunately, a mod has already come to the rescue, as was the case after the launch of the Next-gen updateoptimizing both ray tracing and path tracing for better performance with minimal quality loss.
“Faster RT/PT in The Witcher 3 Remastered with minimal visual impact. PT with one light bounce instead of two: the biggest gain is indoors, where path tracing is slowest. Plus lighter RTXGI for ray tracing,” reads the official description of the Path tracing and ray tracing optimization mod on Nexus Mods created by Schedules.
In addition to providing some comparison screenshots, the modder provided some data on his system’s actual performance improvements:
RTX 5070, 1440p with DLSS Q:
- Path tracing, outdoors: approximately +10%
- Path tracing, inside: approximately +30%
- Ray tracing: around +5-8%
The modder also listed the compromises which, all things considered, are pretty minor.
- Indoors, with path tracing, the darkest corners become approximately 10% darker: less light reflects there. Lighted areas, candles and windows look the same. Outdoors, I measured no difference in brightness.
- With ray tracing, the overall lighting reacts a little more slowly to changes in light.
- While the mod is installed, the in-game RTGI preset option has no effect
Unfortunately, the most demanding ray tracing option The Witcher 3 Remasteredray traced shadows, were left intact as performance tweaks only gave a 1% performance improvement. As such, it is up to the user to activate or deactivate them.
If you are one of those who use NVIDIA DLSS 5-inch The Witcher 3 Remastered, you can also try the settings provided by Nexus Mods user Nesumi for the best results. The user also used the Light rewrite mod with Realistic and Center Overlaps settings to determine how PTDirectLightImpact affects candle lights.
; — Path tracing: light bounces (vanilla 2). The biggest gain, especially indoors.
(Rendering/RT/PathTracer)
PTNumRebounds=3
PTSunImpact=1,180
PTMoonImpact=0.190
PTSkyImpact=0.360
PTDirectLightImpact=0.300; Brightness of reflected light (1.0 = vanilla). Compensates for suppressed bounce.
PTIndirectLightMultiplier=1.685
If you are still unsure about The Witcher 3 Remasteredyou can consult Technical and gameplay analysis by Alessio Palumbo.
About the author: Francesco De Meo has been covering video games and technology since 2012, starting his career at small media outlets like Gamersyndrome and GeekSnack. After joining Wccftech’s gaming section in 2015, he quickly expanded his gaming coverage with in-depth reporting, interviews with iconic industry figures such as Grasshopper Manufacture founder and No More Heroes creator Goichi “Suda51” Suda, Resident Evil series creator Shinji Mikami, Team NINJA president and Nioh series director Fumihiko Yasuda, and Silent Hill creator Keiichiro Toyama, reviews and on-the-ground coverage of major industry events such as Gamescom and E3. When he’s not reporting or reviewing, Francesco performs the genres he loves most, spends time with his six cats, reads, writes music, and plays guitar and drums for his progressive rock band.
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