In 2015, my GTX 770M laptop crumpled like a paper bag when it faced the Witcher 3, leaving me hungry for more power and inspired to build a GTX 1080 desktop a year later. In 2020, that noble beast was in turn taken down by Cyberpunk 2077, almost never keeping a consistent 60fps at 1080p down.
The seasons change, the tide comes and CD Projekt destroys my computers: the meaty, pricey RTX 3070 I got last year can barely hit 40fps with the Witcher 3’s new ray tracing implementation and this is one of the rare times I’ve looked at RT comparisons and gone, “hey, that actually is doing look better!” If you’re like me and like to get some extra performance out of The Witcher 3 Next Gen’s ray tracing, you might want to try mud alikokos Optimized ray tracing (opens in new tab) on NexusMods.
Essentially, alikoko’s mod reduces the number of probes that light beams produce to bounce around a given scene of the game, reducing the load on your GPU while still providing ray-traced lighting. I consider it a user hacked slider for high/medium/low settings for The Witcher 3’s RT global lighting, and alikoko mentioned a 20-30% performance boost over an RTX 2060 Super. Other users in the comments noted a similar improvement, and I found alikoko’s mod helpful with my setup, often going over 50fps with the “performance” preset, RT global, and mostly Ultra settings on DLSS Performance.
However, Alikoko warns of potentially inaccurate lighting in indoor scenes, and the mod isn’t making any adjustments to the RT sub-settings of shadows, reflections, or ambient occlusion just yet. Other issues with The Witcher 3 Next Gen, such as the inefficient CPU usage (opens in new tab) and ray tracing associated memory leak (opens in new tab) reported by Digital Foundry, also persist.
Alikoko’s mod is a valuable tool for the average Joe looking for a taste of that RTX 4090 life, but I ended up throwing in the towel – even with a G-Sync monitor, the game feels sluggish under 60fps, which I wasn’t happy with how much performance would drop over a long play session with ray tracing enabled. With RT off and everything else on Ultra+ (and even the dreaded Hairworks enabled) I have a pretty hard floor at 70fps at 1440p, DLSS quality.
For my next Witcher 3 lighting mod experiment I’m thinking of taking jojolapin102’s Better SSAO (opens in new tab) for a twist – is it really PC gaming if you’re not obsessively modifying this crap more than actually playing the game? If you’re jumping into the Witcher 3 for the first time or a replay, make sure you check it out our guide to getting the Henry Cavill armor (opens in new tab) they added in 4.0, and we have similar guides for the first round of Ursine (opens in new tab) and Feline (opens in new tab) Witcher school sets.