Following its surprise announcement during this year's gamescom Opening Night Live, The Witcher 3 Remastered is now available on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2. While the number of improvements to gameplay is staggering and well thought out, what most were looking forward to was the visual uplift, which includes very demanding path tracing support on PC. Thankfully, a mod has already come to the rescue, as it did after the launch of the Next-Gen update, optimizing both ray tracing and path tracing for better performance with minimal loss of quality.

"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 Hourlines.

Besides providing a couple of comparison screenshots, the modder provided some data on the actual performance improvements on their system:

RTX 5070, 1440p with DLSS Q:

- Path tracing, outdoors: about +10%

- Path tracing, indoors: about +30%

- Ray tracing: about +5-8%

The modder also listed the trade-offs, which, all things considered, are fairly minor.

- Indoors with path tracing, the darkest corners get about 10% darker: less light bounces into them. Lit areas, candles and windows look the same. Outdoors I measured no brightness difference.

- With ray tracing, global illumination reacts a bit slower to light changes.

- While the mod is installed, the in-game RTGI preset option has no effect

Unfortunately, the most taxing ray tracing option in The Witcher 3 Remastered, ray-traced shadows, has been left untouched as the performance tweaks only yielded a 1% performance improvement. As such, it is up to the user to enable or disable them.

If you're among those who are using NVIDIA DLSS 5 in The Witcher 3 Remastered, you may also want to try out the settings provided by Nexus Mods user Nesumi for the best results. The user also used the Light Rewrite mod with the Realistic and Centre Overlaps settings to address how PTDirectLightImpact affects the candle lights.

; --- Path tracing: light bounces (vanilla 2). The biggest gain, especially indoors.

[Rendering/RT/PathTracer]

PTNumBounces=3

PTSunImpact=1.180

PTMoonImpact=0.190

PTSkyImpact=0.360

PTDirectLightImpact=0.300; Brightness of bounced light (1.0 = vanilla). Makes up for the removed bounce.

PTIndirectLightMultiplier=1.685

If you're still on the fence regarding The Witcher 3 Remastered, you can check out Alessio Palumbo's tech and gameplay analysis.

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