This Witcher 3 modification is capable of providing improved performance through its utilization of ray tracing technology.

In my next Witcher 3 lighting mod endeavor, I’m planning to try out jojolapin102’s Better SSAO⁠—can it even be classified as PC gaming if you’re spending more time adjusting all the settings than actually playing the game? If you’re a newcomer to the Witcher 3 or you’re playing it again, make sure to look at our guide on how to get the Henry Cavill armor which was added in version 4.0, and similar guides are available for the initial sets of Ursine and Feline Witcher school armors.

In 2015, my laptop with a GTX 770M GPU was not able to run Witcher 3 properly and this motivated me to build a GTX 1080 desktop the following year. Nevertheless, even with the more powerful GPU, Cyberpunk 2077 proved to be too much for it and I had difficulty achieving a steady 60fps at 1080p low. This year, my relatively new RTX 3070 is only capable of barely reaching 40fps with the Witcher 3’s ray tracing implemented. After seeing the RT comparisons, I noticed that the graphics were improved. To maximize the performance of the ray tracing, I tried out modder alikoko’s Optimized Raytracing mod from NexusMods. This decreases the number of light rays in a given scene, helping to reduce the load on the GPU while still providing ray-traced lighting. It was reported by alikoko that an RTX 2060 Super saw a 20-30% performance increase. Similarly, I also noted an increase and I got more than 50fps with the “performance” preset, RT global, and Ultra settings on DLSS Performance.

However, alikoko has warned that there may be inaccurate lighting in indoor scenes. As well, the mod does not address the RT sub-settings of shadows, reflections, or ambient occlusion, and does nothing to solve The Witcher 3’s Next Gen CPU usage and memory leak issues. Ultimately, I chose to turn off ray tracing and ramp up other settings to Ultra+ with Hairworks enabled. This allowed me to get a consistent 70fps at 1440p with DLSS Quality. For my next Witcher 3 lighting mod experiment, I am looking to try out jojolapin102’s Better SSAO. If you are new to Witcher 3 or playing it again, be sure to check out our guide on how to get Henry Cavill’s armor added in 4.0 and our other guides on the Ursine and Feline Witcher school sets.